can anyone help me what are the right steps to install the adobe reader.
i was in the adobe site and downloaded a file with the extension *.rpm.
i couldn't do with it anything
can anyone guide me to the neccessary steps.
thanx

You need to type rpm -i abode_file.rpm from the commandline. RPM is the redhat package manager. The -i is the install flag.

Look at the rpm man page for more info, type man rpm into the terminal, or look at http://www.rpm.org/.

You haven't said what distro you are using so you may not have rpm installed ...

And if you do not use an rpm-based distribution, like RedHat or Fedora or Mandrake etc., you probably either should not use the rpm at all but choose to download the .tar.gz version (or .tgz or however they archive it), or use rpm2cpio and then cpio or some other tool to convert the rpm package to a format you can use.

If you are not using an rpm based distribution I recommend to either try to find a native binary file of Adobe Reader for your distribution first (like a .deb file), or if you can't find one, then you could use one of the non-Adobe pdf readers (evince for Gnome or kpdf for KDE etc.), or if you just want the Adobe Reader, use the .tar.gz file from Adobe instead of the rpm one. A .tar.gz (or .tgz which is the same thing) is a gzip-compressed tar archive; it can be uncompressed and -archived with GNU tar or a graphical package tool, and the program or it's installer is found inside the archive.

it says
error: Failed dependencies:
gtk2 >= 2.4.0 is needed by AdobeReader_enu-7.0.8-1
what is the trouble?
thanks

Actually if you're using a distributiuon with a graphical package manager (which most advanced RPM-based distributions have) then you don't need to use the command line at all. All you have to do is click on the RPM file from a file manager, then follow the on-screen instructions. That's far easier than trying to work through a primitive command-line interface unnecessarily.

Also the package manager should automatically sort out most dependancy problems for you, which would be a long job to sort out manually using only the command line.

You need to install gtk2 first. Witch distro are you using?
If is redhat-like distro you cound get the rpm from here:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=gtk2