The software isn’t available on the home page of Adobe directly but can be downloaded at the Adobe Labs. The installer is a binary installer that requires root privileges, which were gained after a window prompted me to enter my password. This is the standard way in Ubuntu and therefore handled correctly.

The installation itself is fast and only consists of this window:

After a few seconds, Adobe AIR is installed into /opt and a new menu entry called “Adobe AIR Application Installer” can be found in the menu. All it does is opening a file chooser where you can select and .air file to install it.

The first application I tried to install was the Adobe Media Player.  When I opened the .air file I was greated by this error:

Sorry, an error has accoured

This application requires an update to Adobe AIR but downloading that update on your system is not allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

I don’t know whether there is a workaround for this problem and I didn’t bother to search for one. Instead, I tried other applications. The next one I tried was a Google Analytics interface, which installed whithout problems. I won’t write anything about that application itself because that’s not in the scope of this review.

There are many more AIR applications on the Adobe marketplace, but they are not installable because the website claims that Air is not available for my system.

I will leave it at that for now and come to my conclusions regarding AIR on Linux:

• Adobe AIR for Linux really is alpha software. If you don’t have strong reasons to install it, don’t
• Adobe should settle on one way to deploy Linux software. Flash is available as rpm and tarball, Reader is also available as deb, now AIR brings its own .bin installer. The right way to do things is to offer packages for the major Linux distributions, like Skype does
• Flash is a core part of AIR and Flash on Linux is pretty bad. For most people, Flash consumes lots of CPU power, crashes Firefox and makes fullscreen video impossible. If Adobe doesn’t fix Flash, Air won’t be any better
• Last but not least: It’s great to see that Adobe shows interest in Linux and a runtime that works on all three major desktop operating systems will probably bring more software to Linux. If, however, Adobe continues to treat Linux as a third class citizen AIR might do more harm than good to Linux because software vendors won’t release native software but only “Airplications” that only run badly on Linux, similar to software running on Wine

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

If they really mean games and not game servers this might be a major breaking point for Linux gaming and Linux on the desktop in general.

Valve’s Steam platform is probably the number one way to purchase games digitally, and if it gets ported to Linux it might be a big enough incentive for other game develops to port ther games to Linux, too.

Google Desktop for Linux indexes the files on your computer which leads to almost instant search results.

The software sits in the tray area and is most easily accessed by tapping the Strg key two times, which will show this search box:

The search results appear as-you-type and the files can be opened by a click on the drop down list. If there are many results they can also be listed in the web browser with an interface that closely resembles Google’s online search.

In fact, most of the software interface, like the preferences is only accessible in a web brower. For example, this is the index status on my computer right now, shown in Firefox:

As of now, I didn’t do a thorough test, but this is what I think of the software so far:

Pros:

• It’s always nice to see a company acknowledging the Linux user base.
• The indexing process is very light and barely noticable.
• Google probably shares the same codebase with the Windows and Mac versions so it is fairly proven software.

Cons:

• It’s closed source. This isn’t a show stopper for me, but it may be for some of you, and in any way, an open source version would be better.
• The Windows and Mac version are much more feature rich, for example the Linux version doesn’t support Google Gadgets at all
• The UI is mainly in the web browser, which means it is rather badly integrated with the desktop. I hope they add a panel applet and other means of integration in future versions.
• The native (GTK+) UI doesn’t fit in very well, the context menu of the tray icon isn’t aligned as it is in Gnome apps and no entries have an icon. The dialogues have the button order reversed:
• Google Desktop creates a top level entry in the Applications menu. I know no other software (including Google’s Picasa and Earth) that does this and I have know idea why they chose to to this.

Conclusion:

Google Desktop is one more of those proprietary applications that is now also available on Linux. Whatever your views on “software ethics” are, you probably should agree that this is a good thing. Many people will oppose to using this software and there is nothing wrong with that, but for other people this will lower the barrier to using Linux, and even if it’s only a tiny bit.

I, for one, will use Google Desktop from time to time, but what I’m really looking forward to is Google Talk for Linux.

Hi Carrie! This is just a note that might convince you that this really is one of my old blogs

Some popular distributions, for example Fedora and openSUSE decided to boycott proprietary drivers by not shipping them at all.

Starting with Feisty, Ubuntu trys to strive a middle way between the merits to the user and free software ethics by excluding propietary drivers by default but providing an easy way to enable them.

As of today, the Ubuntu development branch includes a tool called “Proprietary Drivers manager” that trys to accomplish this task.

Once started, the software presents a list of available proprietary drivers:

Drivers can then easily be enabled by checking the box or selecting the desired hardware and clicking ‘Enable’ and is then presented by this dialog:

After the confirmation the particular driver is enabled and as in my case I can enjoy the Desktop Effects without any command line voodoo.

Please note that this is by no means final software and it will probably look different when feisty is released.

This decision has been made since Feisty won’t include either Compiz or Beryl by default and therefore the drivers aren’t necessary.

Practically this means that the reasoning is not ideological but pragmatic and proprietary drivers are probably integrated into future releases.

Read more in the initial announcement and a clarifying blog entry from Mark Shuttleworth.