The SysAdmin Diary

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Firefox plugin on Ubuntu Feisty

After the death of the hard disk in my laptop this week, I thought I would use it as an opportunity to upgrade my laptop to the latest Ubuntu release, Feisty. I’ve always found Gnome a bit sluggish on my 1.2GHz “sub-notebook” Samsung Q30, so this time I opted to install Xubuntu (with XFCE instead of Gnome) and so far I am very impressed, but that’s another story for another day!

One of the first things I noticed setting up the system was that the acroread package is no longer available! Now, I realise that there are “perfectly good” non-Adobe readers for PDF files, but in reality they’re not “perfect”. I often have problems with Evince/xpdf etc printing PDF’s correctly, and just as often with just rendering them on the screen.

Some quick research on Google and I discovered an alternative package repository called “Medibuntu”, in their words — Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) is a repository of packages that cannot be included into the Ubuntu distribution for legal reasons (copyright, license, patent, etc). And they have the Acrobat Reader package! Here are the steps I took to get Acrobat Reader and the Firefox plugin installed on my Ubuntu Feisty machine:

1. Add the Medibuntu repositories as per instructions at http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repository.php. At the command line:
   echo "deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ feisty free non-free" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
2. Add the acroread, acroread-plugins, and mozilla-acroread packages
   sudo apt-get install acroread acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread
3. Restart Firefox

And that’s it!