How To get Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0 working under Wine on openSUSE 11.4

For any fans of this remarkable piece of PDF editing/manipulating software, below is the how-to I posted on WineHQ yesterday:

You need to use the same workaround as on Adobe Photoshop CS5. I have modified the workaround here to reflect the changes for installing and running Acrobat. Make sure you are running the 1.3.19 version of Wine - this did not work with the 1.3.12 version included in the normal openSUSE 11.4 repository. Here is the how-to:

[Note: This is a modification of a how-to posted on unixmen.com for installing Photoshop CS5 under wine on Ubuntu and Linux Mint on May 4, 2011: How to install Photoshop in Ubuntu and LinuxMint | Unixmen. Also, please note - Acrobat 8.0 ran just as fast in a VMWare Player implementation of Windows - the only discernible resource advantage to running it under Wine instead of in a VM is perhaps a smaller memory footprint.]

Things you’re going to need:

A Computer Running openSUSE 11.4 (**may or may not work on other distributions, I only tried openSUSE 11.4), with Wine, q4wine (optional), and Microsoft true-type fonts installed. Get true-type fonts from openSUSE software update. Get Wine from the community repo for Wine CVS, and the Packman community repo, and get q4wine from the openSUSE build service repo for q4wine.

A Computer running Windows (**I was running Windows XP Home SP3 in VMWare Player)

A running copy of Acrobat 8.0 (**sorry, I don't have any suggestions where to purchase or download it - I bought a boxed copy years ago, and I still find it is one of the best Acrobat Pro implementations available).

You need to copy a few registry entries from there for Acrobat to work fine in openSUSE. On Windows Home XP, run regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Software -> Adobe

Right click on the Adobe folder and select “Export”, and name this file “acrobat.reg”.

Switch to your openSUSE machine now.

If you did not configure wine already, Run the following to create your own .wine folder.

$ winecfg

(**make sure to run winecfg from the command line if you make any changes or updates to wine)

The Windows regedit export file you just created, “acrobat.reg”, is a native windows app and has a few Windows based dependencies. You need to use winetricks from the command line to install these. Execute the following:

$ winetricks msxml6

(**NOTE - this did not install correctly on my AMD server, but did not cause a problem. Seems necessary for some architecture)

$ winetricks gdiplus

$ winetricks gecko

$ winetricks vcrun2005sp1

$ winetricks vcrun2008

$ winetricks msxml3

(NOTE - **this did not install correctly on my Dell laptop or my AMD server, but did not cause a problem. Seems necessary for some architecture)

$ winetricks atmlib

Copy the following files from the Windows installation into the .wine directory on your openSUSE 11.4 machine:

C\Program Files\Adobe\ ----> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Adobe

C\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe ----> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/Adobe

C\Documents and Settings$USER\Application Data\Adobe ----> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/users/$USER/Applications Data/Adobe

C\windows\system32\odbcint.dll ----> $HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/odbcint.dll

Once that’s done, copy over your “acrobat.reg” file from your Windows machine to your home directory and execute the command below.

$ wine regedit acrobat.reg

That will import the registry entries into the wine registry.

To test it out, go to go to “Home -> .wine -> drive_c -> Program Files -> Adobe ->Acrobat“ with your favorite shell and right click on the ‘Acrobat.exe’ and select “Open with q4wine” or “Open with Wine”.

Acrobat should now load. You might consider creating a shortcut and placing it on your desktop for easier access.

To create the launcher for Acrobat, make a script with the following text:

#!/bin/bash 
wine "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe" "`winepath -w"$@"`"

and save it as acrobat_launch.sh, and make it executable:

chmod +x acrobat_launch.sh

To associate this with KDE in order to get PDF documents to have the option to open with Acrobat when right clicking the document and choosing “Open With”, take the following steps:
a. launch the “Personal Settings” browser from the main KDE menu
b. select “File Associations”
c. under “Application”, select “PDF”
d. under “Application Preference Order”, select “Add”, and use the small blue browse button to find your copy of acrobat_launch.sh
e. Select “OK”, and then “Apply”. Next time you right click on a PDF document, Acrobat should be available as an application to open the PDF with.