Adobe Acrobat Reader - Firefox Does Not See it as Installed
 

All,

I'm running slackware 13 and I installed adobe acrobat reader. I installed it using the INSTALL file that came in the tarball. When I launch a shell session within KDE, I can execute acroread from my home directory (<adobe_install_dir> is in a different location) and Adobe Acrobat Reader launches successfully. However, when I try to access a web page in firefox with a PDF file, I see the following message:

Could not launch Adobe Reader 8.1.3. Please make sure it exists in PATH variable in the environment. If the problem persists, please reinstall the application.

I believe my test above confirms that it is in the PATH variable in the environment where firefox is running. Has anyone else run into this before or have a suggestion?

Thanks in advance!

Have you got the Adobe plugin installed in Firefox? To find out, type 'about:plugins' ( without the quotes ), and look for

This allows viewing PDF files in firefox.

Yes, I checked that and it does show up there:

Adobe Reader 8.0

File name: nppdf.so
The Adobe Reader plugin is used to enable viewing of PDF and FDF files from within the browser.

I have nppdf.so at the following location: /usr/lib/firefox/nppdf.so. It has the same permissions as the other .so files:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root

Hmmm, on my system I have two copies...

I'm not sure why, however I can browse PDF files in firefox.

I reinstalled and chose the default location of /opt for the adobe_home_dir and the plugin now works. I think there must be something hard coded into the .so file or in some config file used by firefox so it only expects the application to be in /opt/adobe... and not in a directory of your choosing.

Thanks!

Just an idea, but do you have a 32- or 64-bit system? If you have a 64-bit firefox binary installed, and a 32-bit plugin, or vice. versa, then I don't think it will work without something like nspluginwrapper.

I'm using 32 bit slackware.

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