Like always, nothing is without problems - this time is not an exception.
So as everybody has heard the Linux AdobeReader_enu-7.0.8-1 has some holes in it and the 7.0.9-1 is available. So today I thought that it would be a good idea to upgrade my old version to the new version.
Lets just say it did not go as expected....
Its good that Adobe makes an effort to provide the reader in rpm format, but this time I ran into a small problem. It seems Fedoras libgtk-x11 version has gotten a bit too new version. The "rpm -Uvh" went fine, nut when I tried to launch the reader form the start menu nothing happened. After few tries the reader didn't start - no errors nor warning were displayed, so the easiest thing to do was to open my favorite tool the console :)
When starting the "acroread" script from the command line it starts spitting out "expr: syntax error" errors. This usually means that the evaluated expression is faulty ore some values have not been assigned. Right it just couldn't go without the pain of debugging...
Oh well, fairing up the vi and opening the "/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread" showed too much info to start with. First step was to debug the script to see where it crashed. Just by replacing the first line "#/bin/sh" with a bit more intelligent shell with debugging output "#/bin/bash -x" showed me the problem location.
It looks like the "base_version" variable will get an empty value witch on the other hand makes the loop to go wild. So to fix it we have to look at the "get_gtk_file_ver()" function.
And here it is - on line 418 - "echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'". This regex expects to find the version <= 900 but in fedora it is 1000 so we need to mod it to look like this "echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)000.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'". This one extra zero will make it run nicely and this method is applicable on one machine at a time, but when going full scale the regex should be modified to look for 2 OR 3 zeros, so lets hope that Adobe fixes it soon.
This "bug" also hunts the CentOS 5 and RHEL 5 and maybe some other newer distros.
So hope for the best and a quick fix from Adobe :)
technorati tags:Fedora, 7, CentOS, 5, Adobe, Reader, Bug, Fix
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