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Adobe Releases Acrobat Client for Linux
DanMan writes "Adobe has released a reader client (Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0) for the linux operating system. No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start. You can download the client from their site."
Adobe Reader 7.0 Coming to Linux - Described how to download it.
How is this making a start? Acrobat reader 6 didn't count?
I've tried it - it's slower than a retarded kid hopped up on goofballs tired to a tree.
37Mb RPM?! I think i'll just stick with gpdf...
For the impatent:
e nu/
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/7x/7.0/
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The front page five minutes ago should have read: "The next Slashdot story was ready two weeks ago, and subscribers can kick themselves for giving us their money!"
I have used Xpdf exclusively for a long time. In what way is Adobe reader superior to Xpdf?
app-text/acroread-7.0
No news on open sourcing the client, but they're making a start
What the hell? So is every commercial company out there just supposed to release everything as open source? Good grief Charlie Brown...why would they do that?
There are plenty of Open Source options for reading pdf's. There's no reason to expect/demand that a commercial software company should open source their products. I mean, come on people...enough is enough.
I hope they actually bother paying attention to my mouse preferences. Version 5 ignores my scroll wheel and it uses clunky Motif widgets (bleagh). More likely they'll only use the opportunity include some of the more unpleasant misfeatures like spying. Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Direct downloads:
Acrobat Reader 7.0--English for Linux® (.tar.gz), 38.2MB
Acrobat Reader 7.0--English for Linux® (.rpm), 38MB
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I downloaded, installed and ran it a couple of hours ago. I expect it to be done loading real soon now.
Pdfs are Unfit for human consumption
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
xpdf has always functioned MUCH faster and with MUCH greater stability than any version of acrobat I've ever seen.
That said, Any large commercial vendor releasing their software on Linux is a very good thing. Maybe next some more video game vendors will jump on the bandwagon.
And of course competition is always good. This forces both xpdf and adobe to make themselves better.
The Answer
PDF format is open and there are a number of open source viewers for Linux. I don't think it's that important that Adobe open source their reader or even port it at all. This is just one extra option, no big news for us.
It has a button in the upper right corner which opens a browser where you can buy books, it also has some form of Yahoo search in it. I try to keep my computer as clean as possible from commercial interests and this program is borderline. 99% of the time gpdf works fine anyway.
emerge -C for you acrobat.
There's been recent talk about new document "tracking" features that require a call home to read, and other stupid "smart data" junk which require a blackbox client. If Adobe expects me to run their spyware on my Linux machine, they have another think coming.
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I have used kpdf, gpdf, and xpdf as well - they work OK, but in my experience Acrobat Reader is still the goto client if you have a pdf the others can't read or for advanced features. The others are steadily improving, and I think will get there in time, but basically until kpdf/gpdf/xpdf start opening pdf documents as well as or better than Acrobat for all available features, I fear Acrobat Reader will still be around.
Incidently, 7.0 seems to be a huge leap from version 5. Works much better with modern Linux software, despite a few lingering quirks. I had not heard of any pressure or consideration on the part of Adobe to release the code to Reader, but that would seriously rock if they did.
I note with some amusement that the Linux version of Acrobat Reader still has the purchase Adobe Acrobat link in the menus, despite a version not being available on Linux.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
If you want open source, use Ghostscript. I assume (and they probably do too) that to open source part of one of their most lucrative product lines would commercial suicide. It's not like the file format is closed because it isn't.
v.5 did crash quite a bit, esp. the browser plugin. Very frustrating. It was comparitively ugly too.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Christian Marillat has made available unofficial Debian packages of Acrobat 7 since a few weeks now. On sarge or sid, add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:
Then it's as easy as apt-get update; apt-get install acroread mozilla-acroread. This gives you the core functionality and Web browser plugin. (Incidentally, there are a bunch of other useful unofficial debs there, including mplayer and lame.)
You can also install the Javascript plugin and a whole bunch of other Acrobat plugins with apt-get install acroread-plugins. However, be aware that some plugins may report back to the mother ship: LWN article. Also, they will eat another 43 MB of disk space.
- Kevin B. McCarty
Be sure to read this article before you install the reader.
The software contains functionality that could cause serious privacy concerns - it is possible to include a tracking mechanism in PDF's, readers that this great 'feature' will then contact some website and keep track of how many people read that document.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The PDF format is open. You can print to PDF off every platform and office suite except Office on Windows.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
The full PDF specification is available for free download from Adobe's web site. It's in PDF format, so in the worst case you would need to use their (free beer. Mmm. Free beer...) software to print it, but there is nothing stopping you from writing your own software to create or display PDFs. By doing this, they have helped make PDF a common standard, and associated the name Adobe with PDF. I work with PDFs a lot - I read and review material in PDF format, create PDF documents from LaTeX including images and diagrams saved as PDFs, and I don't use a single Adobe product.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Reverse engineer pdf? I thought you could download the spec of the pdf format from Adobe's site. They also publish the spec of the tiff format, and are behind the new digital negative format that is an effort to replace proprietory digital camera RAW formats with an open format.
Closed programs, open formats is, to my mind, a reasonable compromise for a commercial organisation.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I know this is Slashdot and all. But if people expect that everytime a company releases a product for Linux that they MUST OpenSource it or they have "only made a start" then there will never be a market for Linux.
So if Adobe released Photoshop for Linux should they OpenSource it? Are Oracle "only making a start" by supporting Linux because they don't Open Source their database ?
Wake up people. This is good news that people consider Linux a platform worth supporting. This isn't the "start" this is the game.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer so he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandela, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
Nice try, you miserable cut&paste clod.
For the record, your post is basically a complete rip of this post by El Cubano with a couple of lines stacked in front of it. Moderators, please act accordingly.
I do not think behavior such as yours should be encouraged. Actually, I hope you'll reincarnate into some exotic frog, SCO techie, or worse.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
//begin anti-MDI rant
//end rant
I really got screwed by MDI yesterday (with a little of my own carelessness thrown in). I use Windows and MS Office as rarely as possible, but I had to put together a PowerPoint presentation for a talk. I had two open PowerPoint files, and each seemed to be in its own instance of the program - separate windows, separate taskbar tabs. When I closed the one I didn't need, the other one closed as well, taking about an hour's worth of work down with it. Granted, it asked me if I wanted to save my work, but I didn't read the dialog closely enough, because I assumed it referred to the document in the window I was closing.
Try this if you are at a Windows/Office box:
1. open foo.ppt
2. open bar.ppt
3. close the foo.ppt window with the X in the upper right hand corner of the window.
4. poof! both windows disappear.
This is really bizarre behavior. If you do the above, it looks like there are two instances of PowerPoint, each running in its own window, rather than one instance managing two windows, as is the case. And even if one realizes that it is only one instance of the app, closing a window should not exit the app if there are other windows open.
A quick check of apps on my work (Windows) and home (Debian) box revealed only Excel to behave this way. Even MS Word and IE don't do that.
READ this before installing it: http://lwn.net/Articles/129729/
Remote Approach's reporting did not work when we viewed the document with Kpdf, Xpdf and Adobe Reader 5.0.10. It also failed using Apple's "Preview" application on Mac OS X. The document was still viewable with no apparent glitch in other PDF readers, but the reporting function did not work. However, when we opened the file using Adobe Acrobat Reader 7, Remote Approach started logging views from our IP address. After doing a little research, we found that Adobe's Reader was connecting to http://www.remoteapproach.com/remoteapproach/loggi ng.asp each time we opened the document
(Easy fix: Assign a IP which doesn't work ie: 0.0.0.1 to www.remoteapproach.com in your /etc/hosts)
I don't know what's so exciting about acroread or whatever. xpdf seems to have a pretty reasonable, if spartan, interface. Cut and paste doesn't work unless you hack it up a bit to side-step PDF's "protections". I tend to run non-x86 Linux systems, so binary only applications aren't as attractive to me anyways.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Also, (minor), the background color of the button bar doesn't adhere to the theme your desktop is set to. It's a darkish grey, not the lightgrey that's default on RedHat or Debian.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Quote from wikipedia page:
I think, therefore I am. I think?
You just need to go in the installation directory, then in the Plugins subdirectory and remove EVERYTHING BUT these 3 files (just move them somewhere else so you can put them back if you have a problem)
EWH32.api
Search5.api
Search.api
after I did that and disabled the splash screen Acrobat reader 7 loads up nearly instantaneously on XP. I'm not taking credit for this, I found this tip somewhere I can't quite remember right now and it surely works!
the same happened when nero released a version for linux. rather than being appreciated for at last acknowledging the existence of linux, they were shunted for not being 'open' enough, and their product denounced inferior to the free alternative (k3b v nero).
don't moan that companies aren't trying to provide for linux users, if when they do release a product, you write bad reviews of it and criticise their attempts to get closer to a userbase they know little about, and can even fear.
Many people are missing the big picture with Adobe Acrobat. (I freelance graphics) When I send a client a preview of the artwork, I use a combination of XMP, hand-built watermark by myself, and the security of Adobe PDF files. I can choose if someone is allowed to print or not, and I can restrict all modifications to it. So with all three security elements in place, I'm able to manage and control my work, without having to worry about them taking it and not paying.
For those like me who just cannot stand that brightly colored distraction at the top of the app:
Drag any toolbar button on the line with the flashy advertisement down about half its height. This will make a new bar with only that button on it.
Next, drag the rest of the buttons down to the new bar.
Once the last button is moved to the new bar, the old one (and the flashy ad with it!) will disappear and your new ad-less toolbar will move up to replace it.
Locking the toolbars here will prevent it from returning the next time you start the app.
Well, actually, in this case, yes. Acrobat Reader is just that: a READER. It's doesn't hurt them to release it. In fact, it would bolster sales of their actual product: Acrobat. But more importantly, it's supposed to be a cross-platform format, and if they want to support that, they need to make an open, cross-platform reader.
Linux is more than just Linux/x86 on one or two distros, and open source is the easiest way to provide products for all of Linux. So they still have a long way to go before they've even done what this article suggests: releasing a Linux version of Reader.
Acrobat 7 includes spyware right out of the box. When you open certain tagged pdfs, it reports this to a remote server. It appears to just be logging your IP address and reader info -- for now -- but it's javascript based, so any information that Adobe chooses to present to their scripting API is available to it. You can disable javascript, but it will suggest that you re-enable it every time you launch the program, which doesn't constitute disabling as far as any system administrator with lots of users is concerned. There are a variety of hacks that will make this go away. One is listed in the comments of this article:
http://lwn.net/Articles/129729/
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
They didn't release it for Linux - they did release for Linux x86 _only_. Only this one architecture is supported which is sad since I use ppc (fortunately there is great kpdf from kde 3.4) :-)
p opulation.pdf
Anyway please be accurate next time.
Next thing is when I last checked adobe acrobat reader 7 for Linux wasn't able to deal with pdfs that acrobat reader 7 for windows was dealing without any problems - example http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/us_population/us_
Cross Platform != Open Source
I agree that if they open sourced it then the porting to other archs would be far easier, since other people would do the work for them. They don't 'need' to do that though. Sure, it would be nice, but it's hardly required.
I know that most slashdotters live in their own la-la land where everything is ascii and png but for real people in the real world who want to do work on a Linux workstation, Adobe's reader is a brilliant solution to a real problem.
Also, might I remind you that postscript is an Adobe technology.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Next there will be a story about Linux dropping BitKeeper.
SEO Firefox Extension
Apart from the software patents.
Donate free food here
Well, actually, in this case, yes. Acrobat Reader is just that: a READER. It's doesn't hurt them to release it.
Actually, it does. I don't expect them to release source to reader any time soon. The reason is that Reader is a actually a crippleware, even though it's done in rather subtle way: Reader has one amazing feature: it lets you add comments and annotations to a pdf file. But not to every pdf file! You can only annotate pdf file that has annotation "user right" enabled. And the only way to enable that is using Acrobat Professional version! It seems that the api is hidden, and Adobe will not share it with authors of other pdf software.
What it really means is that pdf is not really open format. Most of it is open, but it has some secret parts in it. If they opened reader, they would loose the secret. It would be good thing in my opinion, but they obviously don't share this opinion.
AccountKiller
or simply go to Edit>Preferences>StartUp, and disable "show messages and automatically update.