Acrobat Reader 7 and FC6

I broke down and wanted to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on my FC6 box to replace xpdf. After installing it from the tar.gz version the acroread startup script bombed out with the error: expr substr 2400000000000 1

After a little searching I didn’t find much help so I started looking at the script myself to see if I could track down the problem. It turns out that it wasn’t that hard to fix. First off the script file was located at: /usr/bin/acroread

Open the script file and find the function named “check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path”. This is the location of the first error you will hit. To fix the error you will need to change:

[code lang=”text”]
base_version=`expr substr “${base_version}0000000000″ 1 $len_version`
[/code]

to

[code lang=”text”]
blah1=”${base_version}0000000000″
base_version=${blah1:1:$len_version}
[/code]

You will find this two places and it needs to be changed in both. If you don’t notice the 2nd place it is right after the first in a loop:

[code lang=”text”]
while [ $len_version -gt $len_base_version ]; do
[/code]

The second problem you will have is located in the function “get_gtk_file_ver”. Find this function and change the following line:

[code lang=”text”]
echo $mfile| sed ‘s/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g’
[/code]

to

[code lang=”text”]
echo $mfile| sed ‘s/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)000.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g’
[/code]

Now you should be able to run acroread without errors.

[tags]acroread, fedora, script[/tags]

4 thoughts on “Acrobat Reader 7 and FC6”

  1. Bill Vissman

    Attempting to upgrade my reader from 7.0.8 I received the error message 1714 “Adobe reader 8 cannot be removed. Contact your terch support group. I cand use the old version, and can’t install an update. How to resolve?

  2. Shigeru Imano

    The second set of script that you suggested to change seems same, please see below which I copied from:
    ………….following line:
    echo $mfile| sed ‘s/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g’

    to
    echo $mfile| sed ‘s/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)000.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g’

    Would you please double check if the above is error?

    By the way, I have upgraded FC4 to FC5 & FC6 now. My problem when try to install the latest acrobat reder, AdobeReader_jpn-7.0.9-1.i386.rpm, is that I get error that says “file /usr/bin/acroread from install of AdobeReader_jpn-7.0.9-1 conflicts with file from package acroread-7.0.5-2.2.fc4.rf”.
    So, I thought that your suggestion might solve my problem here.
    Would you please give me your comment?
    Thank you,
    Regards,
    Shigeru

  3. carson Post author

    That should work. One thing I forgot to put in the post is that I was using the tgz file and not the rpm. It could be that they have different scripts.

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