Ubuntu – How to open PDF files directly in chromium-browser and run faster downloads from internet

13.04pdf

I am a bit new in Ubuntu, I installed it a week ago and I have some things more or less set but I am struggling with a couple things, if somebody kindly helpme.

  1. I have installed chromium-browser which I like more than firefox
    because of I think it is faster, but in my University's virtual room
    they have some PDF files uploaded and chromium-browser won't open
    them directly online, it forces to download, I have installed flash
    player because of I wasn't able to view youtube videos but is there
    another plugin or component which allow me to open pdf files without
    downloading? thank you
  2. Additional to that minor problem, when I want to download something
    in direct download, I haven't tried torrent but I don't want such
    solution, is there a way to download the files faster without using
    any software for that task? I mean: setting up something in the
    software. All I find are programs. Thank you

Cheers.

Best Answer

First of all, Welcome to AskUbuntu. And I suggest you to make just one question at once in order to receive the proper support, preferably in English. If you write in Spanish the answers to your question may delay until somebody translate your question.

I can partially answer your question specifically in the first point, related to your issue with the PDF Files and Chromium Browser.

Chromium Browser does not have an embedded PDF reader as Google Chrome does. That's why you won't be able to do anything in order to read your online PDF's directly on the browser and you are forced to download them insted.

You can -anyway- try to install Google Chrome, and copy the respective Google Chrome plugins to your current Chromium Browser in order to make Chromium able to open PDF's directly by following the steps provided in this previous answer by @shaneonabike, please note that in the comments @DanielHershcovich mentions that it will be better if you make a symbolic link to the plugins instead of copying, but this will be useful if you plan to keep both Google Chrome and Chromium Browser. If you plan to uninstall Google Chrome, you may wish to run the steps as mentioned by @shaneonabike, reproduced here for your convenience:

You have two solutions that I can see here (applied to Ubuntu 11.10) [This was inspired by comments above and other sources I found]

  • Install Chrome and then copy over *.so files which technically gets you around the legality issues

Here's how I did that...

  1. Close Chromium
  2. Download Chrome from Chrome distro
  3. Install it on your Ubuntu release
  4. cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/
  5. sudo cp /opt/google/chrome/*.so .
  6. Start Chromium

Note: The new plugins never showed up in my extension listing but suddenly just started working properly. By copy all *.so you are getting support for Flash, FFMPEG, and PDF support.

If you want to copy each individual item here is a listing of them for you to hand pick.

  • libffmpegsumo.so - ffmpeg
  • libgcflashplayer.so - Flash
  • libpdf.so - PDF

I must warn you that Google Chrome and its plugins are non-free software, but this workaround seems not to be harmful at all. (Tested by me).

As of your second question I can't provide you with any solution but I suggest you to open a new question about it in order to receive the proper support from other users.

Good luck!

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