Adobe has announced today the public availability of an Adobe AIR alpha release for Linux. Although the alpha is not feature-complete, it is already capable of running some mainstream AIR applications and is robust enough to facilitate AIR development on the Linux platform. Adobe has also officially joined the Linux Foundation and plans to collaborate with the group in an effort to bring rich Internet application and Web 2.0 technologies to the open-source operating system.

I've been in Adobe's closed test group for AIR on Linux since the beginning of March and have already conducted extensive testing with the AIR runtime for Linux. The Linux implementation is very good and is clearly designed for effective platform integration. One particularly impressive platform-specific feature is integration between the AIR installer and the system's native package manager. On Ubuntu, where I performed most of my tests, I was able to uninstall AIR applications with Synaptic as if they were standard Linux packages.

Package manager integration is significant because it could potentially be used in the future to ensure that AIR applications are consistently updated through the same mechanisms as the rest of the software on the system. Although I haven't tested this feature on other distributions, I'm told by other users that it works seamlessly.

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