What is AIR SDK? Is it the archive you download, is it the directory where you extract it or is it some directory inside that directory, or is it a path to a file inside that directory? (compare ANT_HOME is the bin directory inside the directory where you extract Ant files, for example.)
JAVA_HOME has same idiotic description, but this is at least something you can google and figure out from results. Example of normal description would be you need a package sun-java6-jre or compatible, because if you ask apt-cache or synaptic or similar for JDK, you'll get about 50 options to choose from, and unless you are an experienced Java programmer, you wouldn't know what to choose and what to do with it. Best. Oleg