Problems when installing Adobe Acrobat DC using Wine (Ubuntu)

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It was surprisingly difficult to get this one right. I move back and forth and work between my Windows PC and my laptop with a Linux operating system. It's useful to edit files using the same software when moving across the platforms. There are software that can convert and edit PDF files such as Word or OpenOffice, however, none of them look 100% perfect after the conversion. I use Adobe Reader DC on my Windows machine to annotate and highlight texts, and it works very well. So I set out to find a way to have Adobe Reader available on my Linux machine as well.

There are lots of useful websites online that shows how to do this. However, it turned out to be less straightforward and I ended up spending two days to find a way to do it.

To start with I followed instructions from this website:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-latest-adobe-acrobat-reader-dc-on-ubuntu-18-04-bionic-beaver-linux-with-wine


1. The first step was to download two pieces of software, Wine and Winetricks. Type into the commad line:
sudo apt install wine-stable winetricks
Wine allows you to install windows files in Linux and Winetricks is a tool that can be used to update and adjust Wine.


2. The second step was to download Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and update the system using Winetricks. Type intot the command line:
winetricks mspatcha
However, there is a fault at this point. The place where this patch is usually downloaded from is no longer working, so the update process could not continue. I tried downloading the service pack myself but then it took a long time to figure out where and how to install these updates. With some help from a friend, we managed to find an easier solution:

3. The easiest thing to do (unless you are very familiar with Linux – not me!) was to give a valid web link for the command downloads the service pack from. To do this I used the following steps:

Install gedit
Type into the command line: 
sudo apt install gedit

Open the following file with gedit (make sure the corect ` ` backquotes)
Type into the command line: 
sudo gedit `which winetricks`
Once open, find the section where it says helper_win2ksp4() 
Here you will find the web address where the service pack will be downloaded from. There is a sentence that starts with:

w_download_to win2ksp4 xxxxxx 167bb78d4adc957cc39fb4902517e1f32b1e62092353be5f8fb9ee647642de7e
W2KSP4_EN.EXE

The xxxxx part is the web address (it starts with ftp://), which is where the file will be downloaded from. Replace this link with a valid web address where you can download the service pack, for example: http://ftp.upf.br/pub/win2k/w2ksp4_en.exe
 

Keep everything else the same. And save the document.

Now if you run the command again, it should be able to download the required file from the new web address.Type into the command line:
winetricks mspatcha

Once the system has been updated, you can download Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for Windows 10 from the official Adobe website, save it onto your desktop, then run it using Wine to install. For Example, type into the command line: 


wine AcroRdrDC1901020069_en_US.exe

Adobe Reader should now install without problems. 








Hopefully this has worked for you. It took me ages to get it to work, so I hope this post has at least saved you a bit of time.


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