Ubuntu – Install Adobe Acrobat XI with wine

adobe-acrobatwinewinetricks

Adobe Acrobat XI has a silver rating on WineHQ, meaning it should work, right?

I right click acrobat.exe, and the installation wizard pops up and installs successfully with no errors. However, I tick the 'open application' box at the end of the installation and…nothing happens.

Adobe Acrobat isn't appearing in my list of installed apps. Basically it's not working at all, despite a very promising installation.

WineHQ has this to say on installing Acrobat XI:

What works

opening documents, OCR. No problems by now.
Acrobat asked me to install Adobe Application Manager
(http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4773), so i
did installed and no problem since then.

What does not

Isn't able to install. As first review said, use
winetricks atmlib , and copy the acrobat folder into proper .wine
folder.

Wine beginner here. Could someone explain what he means by use winetricks atmlib , and copy the acrobat folder into proper .wine folder. Could someone guide me through those steps slowly? Thanks. Greatly appreciated, really want to get acrobat working 🙂

Best Answer

I'm the person who wrote the first test results of Adobe Acrobat XI Pro on Wine App database.

You can't install the program using current, official Wine release. If you want install it with - and only with - Wine, you will need a MSI "hack patch" which bypasses some custom MSI action calls required basically by any modern Adobe installer.

The patch for Wine is provided here

The downside is that, at the moment, the patch is rejected from official Wine mainstream releases. However, you can apply it to Wine source code and compile Wine by yourself. After you've compiled Wine and installed it into your system, you should be able to install Adobe Acrobat XI Pro without issues. The patch works also for other Adobe software, such as

  • Adobe Audition (CS5.5 & CS6)
  • Adobe Premiere Pro CS3

(Wine 1.7.36 + patch applied)

I've compared/analyzed the first installation method I described on Wine AppDB ("Copy all files from Windows OS"), and the "MSI hack patch" method. Both of them work: all needed Acrobat files are installed, whichever method you decide to use.

Winetricks requirements for the patch method are as follows:

winetricks msxml3 msxml6 wininet ie8 vcrun6 atmlib

On winecfg, set your Windows version to "Windows 7", before running the Acrobat Installer.

If you have troubles with printing in Acrobat XI Pro, set riched20 override to "builtin" instead of "native" on winecfg.

I hope this information helps you.