How to install Adobe Reader on Ubuntu 13.10

Last updated on November 23, 2013 by Dan Nanni

Adobe provides an executable full installer, as well as .deb and .rpm packages for Linux version of Adobe Reader. As of this writing, the "Canonical Partners" repository is not updated with Ubuntu 13.10, so you cannot install Adobe Reader from the Canonical Partner repository like on previous versions of Ubuntu.

On Ubuntu 13.10, you can instead install the official .deb package of Adobe Reader. But one thing is that the official .deb package is 32-bit version. Therefore, if you are using 64-bit Linux, you need to install additional 32-bit libraries. Here is how to install Adobe Reader on Ubuntu 13.10.

Go to http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/, and download .deb package.

If you cannot find the .deb package from the website, you can use this command to download .deb package from the command line.

$ wget http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/9.x/9.5.5/enu/AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

Use dpkg command to install .deb package.

$ sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.5.5-1_i386linux_enu.deb

Note that the above command will not succeed in one shot, due to unmet dependency requirements. It will fail with the following errors.

Don't worry. Go ahead and run the following command. This will automatically fix broken dependencies, and install Adobe Reader.

$ sudo apt-get -f install

If you are running 32-bit Ubuntu, you are done at this point. If you are using 64-bit Ubuntu, there is one additional step needed, as explained below.

Additional Step for 64-bit Ubuntu

As mentioned earlier, the .deb package released by Adobe is 32-bit version, so Adobe Reader expects to use 32-bit libraries. To resolve this issue, run the following command to install necessary 32-bit libraries manually.

$ sudo apt-get install libxml2:i386 lib32stdc++6

Now you can launch Adobe Reader.

$ acroread doc.pdf

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