update: This article has been updated for Ubuntu 8.04. See the latest instructions here.
It was recently pointed out to me on one of our local mailing lists that my previous tutorial on installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader for Firefox no longer worked. It seems that those packages have been pulled from the repository since that writing. I wanted to take a few minutes and give an update on a different method of installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader.
Installing Adobe Acrobat
It appears now that the simplest way to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader is to get the package directly from Adobe’s website. Try following these steps to find the .deb package and install that.
- Visit the Adobe Reader download page.
- Select “Linux”, Select “Linux – x86 .deb”, Select your language.
- Click the “Continue” button.
- Click “Download Adobe Reader” to begin the download.
- You can then “Open with…” to open it with the package installer directly, or “Save as” to be distributed to your other machines and installed manually via double-click on the package.
If you’re going to call the reader directly you’ll also need to configure two more items within the Adobe Reader preferences. Open the reader via “Applications > Office > Adobe Reader 8″ and it should give you a message concerning a libgtkembedmoz.so. After you click OK it’ll give you a blank window with no options. Switch back to the previous window and select “Edit > Preferences > Internet” as suggested by the previous notification window.
In the “Select Browser” area near the bottom put in the following two paths to pacify the Adobe Reader:
/usr/bin/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox
At this point you can save and close your changes and restart the application. This time you shouln’t see any errors and it should work as planned. I have noticed that no errors are reported when directly opening a .pdf from the web–everything just opens. This seems to only happen when launching the reader directly.
Personally I prefer the installed .pdf reader, Evince that already comes with my installation. I haven’t personally had any need to run the non-free Adobe version, but apparently some do. I hope these steps work for you and thanks again for reminding me that my previous steps don’t work.
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