AdobeReader Adobe Reader Icon(also known as Acrobat or acroread) is the free Adobe PDF viewer which is an essential for any modern PC or workstation. While this has been available for Linux for some time, we Linux users have often had to make do with an outdated version, ie a version older than available to Windows users.

I have been using version 7 on my Gentoo Laptop for quite a while now. However, when I was updating a client system last week (a Mepis Workstation) I saw that AdobeReader v8 was installed. This version has not yet made it into the Gentoo distribution.

As always, Linux is about options so I downloaded the “tarball” distribution from here

Installation goes something like this……

angus ~ # cd ~nigelb/downloads/adobe/AdobeReader
angus AdobeReader # ls
COMMON.TAR  ILINXR.TAR  INSTALL  ReadMe.htm
angus AdobeReader # ls -l
total 119812
-rw-r--r-- 1 nigelb nigelb  13414400 2007-08-21 08:29 COMMON.TAR
-rw-r--r-- 1 nigelb nigelb 109035520 2007-08-21 08:29 ILINXR.TAR
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nigelb nigelb     24717 2007-08-21 08:28 INSTALL
-rw-r--r-- 1 nigelb nigelb     72990 2007-08-21 08:28 ReadMe.htm
angus AdobeReader # ./INSTALL
This installation requires 117 MB of free disk space.
 
Enter installation directory for Adobe Reader 8.1.1 [/opt]
/opt
 
Installing platform independent files ... Done
 
Installing platform dependent files ... Done
Please login again for changes to MIME types and icons to take effect.
 
angus AdobeReader # locate libgtkembedmoz
/usr/lib/nvu/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/libgtkembedmoz.so
angus AdobeReader #

The new version certainly looks much better that version 7 and has many functions not previously available. The effort (and the 40Mb+ download, therefore seems worthwhile.