I made it through the 30DC with Linux without any real problems. The AIR thing was the worst part and took less than about 10 minutes to get fully set up and operational (once I found a posting in the AIR forum on manual setup). AIR comes pre-compiled (*not* open source), so there's nothing to build (which is probably why it works so poorly on *NIX).
If I could find the forum posting, I'd just link that instead, but I don't. So here it goes:
1. Download and extract AIR tarball from Adobe.
2. Download and unzip Market Samurai (or Twhirl, or whatever) AIR file.
3. Run 'adl' binary from #1 above: "adl -nodebug <path-to-MS-files>/META-INF/AIR/application.xml <path-to-MS-files>/MarketSamurai". I made a simple bash script to I can just run "ms" to have it launch. An 'alias' would work as well.
That's it. It's really easy. You'll need to download and extract AIR file updates manually, but since you can just extract over the old files, it takes a few seconds at most.
A friend and I both completed the whole challenge without problems with our Fedora 9 machines. After you get past the AIR stuff, you just need an email client and a browser (and you've obviously got that part under control or you wouldn't have made it this far!).
Good luck - feel free to post back and let me know if you need more help.
- Brock