May 21, 2021

Fedora and Adobe Acroread

Adobe used to make a half-hearted attempt to supply the "acroread" PDF viewer for linux. They abandoned this entirely back in 2013 and you are on your own, installing the crusty old 9.5.5 version, which was the last thing they supplied.

Just recently I had this old acrobat refuse to display a file and tell me that I needed a more recent version of the acrobat reader. I decided that a person would be well served by exploring other ways to view PDF documents on linux, and hence the following link:

My advice in a nutshell. Use Okular or Atril to view PDF documents.

So you still want to run Acrobat, eh?

Problems installing acrobat seem to come and go and depend on what linux distribution you are running. I use the ancient RPM mentioned below and sorted out the dependencies by hand. Rhe RPM apparently does not properly indicate dependencies.

Freddy has taken on the chore of repackaging all this as a tar file with instructions (see below) in an attempt to make this easier for folks.

Fedora 32

I am currently running Fedora 32 and I downloaded AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.rpm and don't recall anything tricky. I simply did a dnf install of the RPM and everything seemed to work. There are a bunch of package dependencies, as outlined here:

The writers of the above post even supply one library libidn.so.11.6.18 as a special item on their website.

Freddy's method - circa 5-2021

I got an email from Freddy Jensen 5-20-2021 as follows: 

I have updated the Acroread Linux installer to support Fedora-34.
 Please find the new release here:

 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bo2ebl8z2gkyjm9/AAA4mkjg52Kf4mk_UbSyQoyKa?dl=0

 1) Go into the folder: Acrobat/Acroread/Linux-Installer/2021-05-21-Version-1.0.3

 2) Copy the two files: acroread.tar and readme.txt

 3) Follow the instructions in readme.txt

Freddy's method - circa 12-2020

In late December of 2020, I was contacted by Freddy Jensen, who told me that he had worked up a process to make this more civilized. I have not used this myself (since I already have acroread installed and working).

I downloaded his files and I make them available for your convenience here. His tarball includes the RPM, which accounts for most of the 60M size. His files are available at the following links.

Here are Freddy's instructions:

Starting with Linux Fedora-29 and forward there have been some problems with installing Adobe's Acrobat Reader 9.5.5-1 using the Linux 'dnf' command with AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i486linux_enu.rpm.
The problems are described here: 

 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1646701
 http://www.deskdr.com/dr/adobe-reader-9-linux-ubuntu.html
 http://www.deskdr.com/dr/installing-adobe-reader-on-linux.html
 http://kofa.mmto.arizona.edu/computers/linux/fedora/f29_dnf_upgrade.html
 https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-adobe-acrobat-pdf-reader-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel

To address these problems I have reverse-engineered the installer so Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.5.5-1 can be successfully installed and run on Fedora-29 and forward.

If you want to check it out, then please see: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bo2ebl8z2gkyjm9/AAA4mkjg52Kf4mk_UbSyQoyKa?dl=0 1) Go into the folder: Acrobat/Acroread/Linux-Installer/2020-12-27-Version-1.0.2 2) Copy the two files: acroread.tar and readme.txt 3) Follow the instructions in readme.txt

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]