Adobe AIR blows on Linux

I recently decided I wanted to try out twhirl. Since I'm on Ubuntu Gutsy, twhirl runs on Adobe AIR, I knew it was trouble, but I thought I'd give it a try. After all, I recalled reading about an alpha release of AIR. Okay, so I got what I asked for.

So first off, twhirl doesn't work. After installing AIR (which actually wasn't too bad, despite "chmod 777" instructions that would murder a newbie). The webpage-embedded install wouldn't work. So I gave up.

Then, two days later, I try to open an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet (.ODS). Adobe AIR hijacked the .ODS extension! I can't open my spreadsheet? What the FUCK?!? So I right-clicked on my file, went to Properties, Open With, and added OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet. That should work, right? Wrong-o. This thing hijacked the mime type for .ODS and made it "Adobe AIR Application". So now I can't open my spreadsheets, because I get this error:
and when I try to open an AIR application it tries to open it in OOo!

Of course, it installed Goddess only knows what binaries on my machine. For all I know I've been rootkitted. I have no clue how to remove it – the release notes have nothing to say on the subject.

I can fix this. I can fix my MIME types and track down and murder the crapware I've infected my machine with. But word to the wise: do NOT install the Adobe AIR alpha on a machine that you want to do actual work with, because it will be fuxored. Just goes to show you the lack of depth of Adobe's understanding of Linux, their limited capability and exposure to the platform. Furthermore, it goes to show they don't understand the free software universe if they're going to hijack the file extension for frigging OOo.

---

Here's a fix:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" uninstall "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"
sudo gedit "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... remove these three lines:

<magic priority="100">
<match type="string" value="PK\003\004" offset="0"/>
</magic>

then:

sudo "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/xdg-utils/xdg-mime" install --mode system --novendor "/opt/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/support/AdobeAIR.xml"

... and you're welcome, Adobe. Maybe you could update those release notes? No? I thought not.