My attempts to install Adobe AIR on the Asus eee 701 (running the default Xandros distro) were foiled several times in spite of following the instructions:

1. Download Adobe AIR
2. Make the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin file executable
3. Run the .bin file as a superuser

I got a nice friendly fail message from the Adobe AIR installer every time.

I found a few relevant forum posts, e.g. Adobe Air Linux won’t install on Eee PC, that suggested memory was an issue. Sure enough, running in Full Desktop Mode with 1440×900 screen resolution (on an external display), I only had about 90MB of 500MB free.

I restarted the eee in Easy Mode and then immediately ran AdobeAirInstaller.bin. Success! (I later found these same instructions on the eee user forums.)

Installing Tweetdeck was trivial at that point: download the .air file, find it in the File Manager, and double-click it. However, when I ran it, it didn’t do anything. At one point I got a message that I was running an unknown desktop, and that Tweetdeck required Gnome or KDE.

I restarted in Full Desktop Mode, and was surprised to find a Tweetdeck icon already on the desktop. I ran it and was prompted to use KWallet, a KDE password manager. I canceled out of that, and found that Tweetdeck opened, but still didn’t do anything.

I tried again, activated the KWallet password manager, and then it worked! Tweetdeck prompted me for my twitter login, I additionally logged in to Facebook, and now I have a mean, lean, social networking machine.

Naturally, it wasn’t the highest priority on my to-do list, but I finally decided to get around to it. But I kept getting an error message: “no such file C:\air\eightball\in”

I had decided try the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3, which makes slapping together a simple AIR app a breeze. But every time I clicked the “Create AIR File” button, I got the same error message. I could preview the app just fine, though.

I set up a the “Hello, World” example, and that worked just fine. What gives?, I thought. It must be a problem with one of my files. One by one I removed the files, but I still got the error message:

no such file C:\air\eightball\in

I eventually figured it out: the digital certificate password apparently only accepts 15 characters. “in” happened to be the 16th and 17th characters of the password I used for the digital certificate. Once I used a shorter password, it created the file without incident. Rest easy, netizens: You can now make all your important decisions with a desktop eight ball.