Install Adobe Reader in Debian Squeeze 64 bit

This post is from here.

Introduction .

The aim of this small article, is to offer a way of installing Adobe Reader in the 64 bit version of Debian Squeeze .You can justifiably ask, “why would you want to do that ?” After all, the native evince works just fine .Well, on this occasion, I downloaded a pdf file from a bank, which has a built in capability to enable a form to be filled in, printed off and sent back .Unfortunately, evince cannot do that, so Adobe Reader was the only game in town .

Problems.

If you attempt to download Adobe Reader from their website, it comes in a 32 bit form that will not work natively in a 64 bit environment .However, you can make it work .

I actually learned the hard way, but here's a simplified method that should work for you .

Method .

First, open up Synaptic and install:

ia32-libs

ia32-libs-gtk

(they are the 32 bit libraries that will allow Adobe Reader to work) .If you're a command line guru, you don't need me to tell you how to install directly from there !

Second, go to the Adobe website and download the Adobe Reader version for Linux .At the time of writing, it was; AdbeRdr9 .4.7-1_i486linux_enu.binand save this to your “home” folder .

Open up a root terminal and navigate to your home folder with the following command:

cd /home/[your name]

and hit Enter;

(substitute [your name] for whatever your home folder is called – normally your first name) .

Now make the Adobe bin file executable with the following command:

chmod +x AdbeRdr9 .4.7-1_i486linux_enu.bin

and hit Enter;

(if you've downloaded a different file, make sure it's the correct file and modify the file name as necessary) .

Next, you need to install the bin file with this command:

./AdbeRdr9 .4.7-1_i486linux_enu.bin

(that is simply a full stop followed immediately by a forward slash and the file name)

hit Enter .

Adobe Reader will now install and create it's own menu item under Office, provided you have Open Office as default installed .

If you already have evince set up as he default pdf reader, other than changing the default, you can open a pdf document with Adobe Reader, by right clicking and telling it to “open with” .

Hope that's useful and good luck.