Linux Multimedia Hacks

Install the Acrobat Reader Plug-in

View PDFs within your web browser with the official Acrobat Reader plug-in.

While there is still quite a ways to go, commercial support for the Linux platform has come a long way, particularly in the multimedia realm. One good example of this is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader program. While there are a number of other open source alternatives under Linux for reading PDF files, they neither seem to quite have as nice a user interface nor render PDFs as nicely as Acrobat Reader. In this hack, I describe the steps needed to install and configure Acrobat Reader and its associated browser plug-in.

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software is proprietary, so most major distributions don’t package it out of the box. This means that the standard methods you might use to install software automatically under Linux won’t work, so you must install Acrobat Reader the old-fashioned Windows way—go to the official web site, download the software from there, and install it.

Tip

A number of third-party or non-free repositories exist for different distributions that have packaged Acrobat Reader, or at least a script that automates the process of downloading and installing it. The method and package name to use will vary depending on your distribution, but acroread is a common name for the package, with acroread-plugin and mozilla-acroread being popular names for the Mozilla plug-in.

First, visit the official Acrobat Reader page at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html