Monday 21 February 2011

Adobe and Fileopen pain

Not really a 100% IT security post. But Fiona had an issue with getting a particular sites print functionality to work on her Ubuntu laptop. It seemed to "print" by opening a PDF, that was secured in some fashion. Having a look at the error led no where, something like "could not open plugin". Having a look at source etc didn't give any help, there was no help page that Fiona could find on the site.
I resorted to trying to open the files with Windows, bam it tried to install a plugin called Openfile, I found there was a Linux version of OpenFile here.
Excellent, a Linux version I downloaded it and ran the installer shell script, it error'ed out as I had Adobe9.3 installed, the latest. Looking in the script it had a check for the version of Adobe installed, it only checks for 7 or 8, else fail. Googling led me to a recipe sites support page with posts from back in 2008 with someone complaining that Adobe 9 wasn't supported, the recipe site had started to ditch FileOpen as the support request hadn't been fixed to support Adobe9. The main reason I am posting this is to help others in this predicament.
It was important I get the site to work, so I assured Fiona that windows was not the answer.
I ran the following (as I had installed it manually from a deb from adobe just in case it was an old version issue) sudo sh /opt/Adobe/Reader9/bin/UNINSTALL
Then managed to download an older version from here http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/unix/8.x/8.1.1/enu/AdobeReader_enu-8.1.1-1.i386.deb and installed it, then ran the OpenFile shell installer and all was good, site worked all was happy with the world.
Just posting this for anyone else who has the issue.

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