In my quest for a solution to my desire for a decent twitter client I remembered (randomly) that twirl was an Adobe AIR app and wasn’t AIR supposed to support Linux?

Well in short: Yes

however as if often the case adobe air is not available in portage but Gentoo being Gentoo there is always a way.

A Solution was found which describes how to install the AIR SDK beta. now adobe air is currently in version 1.5 and while im not sure how the history works out but the links in the linked page were no longer correct, anyway, here is my (highly derivative) guide

  1. Download the Adobe AIR SDK from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/sdk/
  2. Unpack the Downloaded Software:
    Create a directory to store the SDK (for example /opt/air)
  3. Extract the AIR-SDK’s .tbz2 file in the directory you just created

    cd /opt/air
    tar jxvf /path/to/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

  4. Create another directory for Adobe AIR applications (for example /opt/air-apps)
  5. Download and Unpack an Adobe AIR Application (for example twirl-0.9.2.air)Create a sub-directory for the application. (for example /opt/air-apps/twirl)cd /opt/air-apps/application-name
    unzip /path/to/application-name.air
  6. finally you can now use ADL to launch your application

    /opt/air/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/air-apps/application-name/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/air-apps/application-name

    or for example

    /opt/air/bin/adl -nodebug /opt/air-apps/twirl/META-INF/AIR/application.xml /opt/air-apps/twirl

Now you can enjoy your Adobe AIR applications!