Installing Adobe Acrobat on Ubuntu Linux

I was having trouble the other day installing Adobe Acrobat Reader on my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx machine. At the time, I was downloading a particular PDF form from a website which contained fill-in-form fields. Despite installing Adobe Acrobat 9 from the repositories I found this version came up short when displaying PDF fill-in-forms.  The result I got was an uglier than ugly message:

Please wait…
If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF
viewer may not be able to display this type of document.
You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by
visiting http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.
For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/support/products/
acrreader.html.

And the rest.

When you get to Adobe’s website on the above link, you get treated to a page requesting you to download a bin file.

However, not being that clued up with the ‘bin’ file format I attempted to execute the file that was downloaded using:

sudo sh ./AdbeRdr9.3.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin

The error I received was:

AdbeRdr9.3.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

The SOLUTION to the problem is very simple (as most are) and it is to make the bin file executable before attempting to run it.  Here’s how to do this:

From the terminal and in the same directory as you have downloaded your bin file in, type the following:

$ chmod +x AdbeRdr9.3.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin

(Looks like nothing happened right, well, it did! Your file is now executable!) Now attempt to run it:

$ sudo ./AdbeRdr9.3.2-1_i486linux_enu.bin

You should receive the message below:

Extracting files, please wait. (This may take a while depending on the configuration of your machine)

This installation requires 145 MB of free disk space.

The installer will prompt you to ‘Enter installation directory for Adobe Reader 9.3.2 [/opt]‘ – type in ‘/opt’ (without the quotes).  Once done, the install will create a Adobe Desktop icon – simply double click on the icon to open Adobe Acrobat Reader and breathe easy again knowing you won’t have to race over to Windows just yet.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 12:13 am and is filed under Creative Internet By Design Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.