Installing Adobe Reader in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

For those who like Adobe Reader to read PDF files, you may find it difficult to install Adobe Reader on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems. Assembling information from a few posts, here is the solution that worked for me,

sudo apt-get clean all
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install adobereader-enu
sudo add-apt-repository -r "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner"
sudo apt-get clean all
sudo apt-get update

If you are on a x64 system, you may see many annoying warning messages when you run acroreader, such as,

......
(acroread:19366): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "murrine",
......
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gail"
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "atk-bridge"

To get rid of the warning messages, install these four packages gtk2-engines-murrine, libcanberra-gtk-module, libatk-adaptor, and libgail-commonfor i386 as follows,

sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine:i386 libcanberra-gtk-module:i386 libatk-adaptor:i386 libgail-common:i386

If you are running Gnome like I do, then the last step is to set up default application for open PDF files. This is to edit the /etc/gnome/defaults.list file.

sudo gedit /etc/gnome/defaults.list

The editing is to find and replace the line

application/pdf=evince.desktop

by

application/pdf=acroread.desktop

and add the following lines to the end of the file,

application/fdf=acroread.desktop
application/xdp=acroread.desktop
application/xfdf=acroread.desktop
application/pdx=acroread.desktop

Finally, run nautilus to apply change if you do not wish to log out and log back in.

nautilus -q