I will try to keep this short and simple. Adobe reader is needed only if you need to do forms and such advanced things in PDF files. Otherwise, Ubuntu comes with default tools such as evince to do all kind of usual reading of PDF files. If your system is a very old one, you can even try installing xpdf package.

That being said, let’s go ahead and install Adobe reader. First, download the .bin file from adobe website : http://get.adobe.com/reader/ . Once the file is downloaded, issue the following commands to install it.

Inside a terminal :

chmod a+x acro...bin
./acro...bin

and follow on-screen instructions.

If you are running a 64 Bit version of Ubuntu, you might need to install a few 32 bit libraries to get it working. Specially if you are facing errors like : “acroread: error while loading shared libraries: libgdk_pixbuf_xlib-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”

sudo aptitude install libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386
sudo aptitude install libgtk2.0-0:i386

Adobe Reader should work fine now. Enjoy 🙂