Wed Mar 9 22:52:54 EET 2011

How to install adobe acroread on Debian Squeeze

After upgrading my Debian from testing/unstable to Debian Squeeze. The apt-get utility suggested to remove a couple of packages including the flashlplugin package and acroread

After the package got wiped out as a requirement I was missing the acroread package.

Logically I wanted to get back the package with apt-get intsall acroread

For some weird reason at that time the package was no longer existing for installation. The only packages that I could find with apt-cache search acroread were:

acroread-debian-files - Debian specific parts of Adobe Acrobat Reader acroread-fonts-jpn - Japanese fonts for Adobe acrobat reader

nevertheless none of the two aforementioned was not installable, e.g. whenever I tried to install them I got the some failed dependencies.

After a very prolonged investigation I figured out the whole issues were caused by my debian-multimedi defined package sources in /etc/apt/sources.list file.

My wrongly defined repository for debian-multimedia looked like so:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main

However it appears the acroread and acroread-plugins packages are provided by the non-free part of the debian-multimedia repository, therefore I needed to sbustitute the above repo definition as follows:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

Further on as a last resort to have the Adobe Acroread properly installed and running on my Debian Squeeze it was necessary to execute the following few commands:

debian:~# apt-get update
debian:~# apt-get install acroread acroread-plugins


Now I have my acroread back installed to my debian squeeze system ;)