Installing Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 14.04

Nov 21, 2015

Yesterday I was generating some PDFs with attachments in Java (using Apache PDFBox if you're interested) and needed to check if the attachments were really there.

Unfortunately, it seems neither MuPDF nor Evince support attachments (I didn't try other viewers) so I had to install Acrobat Reader to check them.

As there's no official Linux package on the Adobe website it's not so straightforward to install it on Ubuntu. But it's not complicated either.

The Installation

1. Download the AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb package:

   $ wget ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

2. Install it:

   $ sudo dpkg -i AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

   It will finish with missing dependency errors, like this:

   Selecting previously unselected package adobereader-enu.
   (Reading database ... 120320 files and directories currently installed.)
   Preparing to unpack AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb ...
   Unpacking adobereader-enu (9.5.5) ...
   dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of adobereader-enu:
    adobereader-enu depends on libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.4); however:
     Package libgtk2.0-0 is not installed.
   
   dpkg: error processing package adobereader-enu (--install):
    dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
   Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1ubuntu1) ...
   Errors were encountered while processing:
    adobereader-enu

3. Install the missing dependencies:

   $ sudo apt-get -f install --no-install-recommends

   --no-install-recommends is optional. I use it to avoid installing unneeded packages.

4. Everything should be fine now and you can run Acrobat Reader:

   $ acroread

That's it. I hope it helped you.