Barely a month after getting the 1.0 version of its cross-platform AIR runtime out, Adobe has hatched the “pre-alpha” version for Linux clients. While that might sound counter-intuitive considering that the primary target was supposed to be the browser, the idea of frameworks like AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight have been for universal rich clients that could span browser and rich desktop.

Accompanying the ridiculously early Linux client for AIR is a slightly more advanced update to the existing Alpha for the development tooling counterpart, Adobe Flex Builder 3 for Linux.

These preview versions of AIR and Flex Builder for Linux can now be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

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