Weblog entry #84 for dkg
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Adobe recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.6.19140 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux update to Adobe AIR 2.7.0.1948.However, looking at Adobe's instructions for installing AIR on "Linux" systems, we see that it is impossible for people running a free desktop OS to follow Adobe's own recommendations:[...]
June 14, 2011 - Bulletin updated with information on Adobe AIR
Beginning June 14 2011, Adobe AIR is no longer supported for desktop Linux distributions. Users can install and run AIR 2.6 and earlier applications but can't install or update to AIR 2.7. The last version to support desktop Linux distributions is AIR 2.6.So on the exact same day, Adobe said "we recommend you upgrade, as the version you are using is vulnerable" and "we offer you no way to upgrade".
I'm left with the conclusion that Adobe's aggregate corporate message is "users of desktops based on free software should immediately uninstall AIR and stop using it".
If Adobe's software was free, and they had a community around it, they could turn over support to the community if they found it too burdensome. Instead, once again, users of proprietary tools on free systems get screwed by the proprietary vendor.
And they wonder why we tend to be less likely to install their tools?
Application developers should avoid targeting AIR as a platform if they want to reach everyone.
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You could also put this in a cronjob if you want to subject your computer to the latest craziness from Adobe.
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But your idea brings up another interesting question: how can you tell within a script whether the local machine it's running on is online? Even better, how can this be done *generically* within a script so that it could be done within a Debian package?
I'm asking it this way because it illustrates another problem I'm working on. I could do a 'ping -c 3 www.yahoo.com' to figure out if the machine is online, but that probably isn't appropriate for doing for a program that's packaged in Debian. And without knowing whether the machine is online, it's unclear whether the network task to be done is worth starting.
So if anyone has ideas on this -- please let me know. Thanks.
-- Chris Knadle
Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
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hxxp://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/ex amples/python/nm-state.py
(no http because I can't post links)
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What I'm currently looking into is /etc/network/run/ifstate which states which network devices are "up", or adding a script within the /etc/network/if-up.d/ and /etc/network/if-down.d/ areas.
-- Chris
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I think it's fair to say that AIR and Flash are both mortally wounded. Adobe had clearly stated that their long term goal is to move to HTML5, and the abandonment of AIR on some platforms and mobile Flash are the first in a series of steps which will see them change direction. It's not nice but at least Debian will survive, there are lot of big companies that invested a lot of cash in AIR and aren't going to realise any profit...
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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To be clear, even when it was "supported," AIR on Linux was incredibly buggy. If I had an AIR app running, it would make my web browser crash when visiting pages with certain Flash applets.
(No, I am not making this up; an Adobe engineer confirmed the issue to me on Twitter).
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Your post made it to Debian Planet, and I'm glad it did. I just found out something a bit interesting about Debian's flashplugin-nonfree package which is worth pointing out, which is that it doesn't automatically update. The package contains a script that downloads Adobe Flash and installs it, but this only happens upon initial installation, or by manually running /usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree. Since the flashplugin-nonfree package doesn't need to be updated with new releases of Flash, it isn't, so by default the installed version of Flash on the local machine becomes stale.
Reinstalling flashplugin-nonfree is a quick way to update the version of Flash again, which at present updates the version of Flash to 11.1.102.55.
-- Chris Knadle
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