I’m dedicating a small post to this just because asked me about this a while back, and I never did answer his comment on that. (Apologies, Glenn!) He asked me at that time:

Any word on how tricky it is to get ADE to run with Wine? This is, of course, relevant to my interests!

I waffled on answering this in no small part because I didn’t actually know. I don’t normally run Linux as a desktop OS at home, although I have an Ubuntu VM on my Macbook, so I had no firsthand information. But that said, one of the lovely things about the Linux community is that if you have a question that needs settling, chances are somebody out there has investigated that problem and has a solution or at least a workaround.

A judicious bit of Googling therefore got me this thread on the Ubuntu forums, wherein users are discussing ADE on Linux via WINE. It dates back to 2008-2009, but given that I still haven’t heard that Adobe plans to do a Linux version of ADE any time soon, (and, for that matter, I haven’t seen a new build of ADE in a while either), I’d say it’s a safe bet the information therein is still reasonably current.

Anybody out there who does have firsthand experience running ADE on Linux, or who is aware of any Linux-based solutions for checking out ebooks from libraries, do speak up!