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How To Install Free PDF Reader In Linux (Ubuntu Lucid Lynx)

Using Ubuntu as the example, this article shows you how to install and use Free PDF Reader in GNU/Linux.

By V. Subhash

In this article, I will show you the steps to install Gnostice Free PDF Reader in Ubuntu 10.04 a.k.a. Lucid Lynx. In other GNU/Linux distributions, you can follow similar steps.

Install Sun Java Runtime In Ubuntu Linux Lucid Lynx

Free PDF Reader is a Java application. It needs Sun Java Runtime in your Linux installation.

Download Self-extracting Java Runtime installer from http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp to your Downloads folder.
Open Terminal (from the menu Applications » Accessories).
Create a directory named java.

sudo mkdir /usr/java

Copy the self-extracting installer to that directory.
```
sudo cp ~/Downloads/jre*.bin /usr/jav
```
Navigate to the directory
```
cd /usr/java
```
Execute the installer.
```
sudo sh ./jre*.bin
```

Create a link to the java executable in /usr/bin

sudo ln -s /usr/java/jre*/bin/java /usr/bin/java

You can check your Java installation by typing the command java -version. Some Linux distributions do not have the sudo facility. If that's the case with your installation, then run the shell with root privileges and omit sudo from the above commands.

Install Free PDF Reader

Get Free PDF Reader download file to your desktop. Extract the contents of the zip file to some location, say, your home directory. This will create a directory named freepdfreader. In this folder, you will find a file named FreePDFReader.jar. This is the main executable of Free PDF Reader.

Create A Launcher For Free PDF Reader

Right-click on the desktop and select Create Launcher option from the context menu. In the Create Launcher window, click the Browse button and select the FreePDFReader.jar in the freepdfreader directory. This will enter the full path of the jar file in the Command box. That's not all. Prefix the command with java -jar. On my computer, I have the command as:

java -jar /home/subuntu/freepdfreader/FreePDFReader.jar

In the above command, replace the /home/subuntu/freepdfreader/ with the path of the directory that contains FreePDFReader.jar and other Free PDF Reader files. (Tip: To obtain the path of the installation folder, open the folder in Nautilus and perform the Ctrl+L keyboard shortcut. You will then be able to copy the path of the folder from the Location box.)

Free PDF Reader does not ship with a good icon for Linux. In Ubuntu, I find the icon at /usr/share/icons/gnome/scalable/apps/accessories-dictionary.svg appropriate for Free PDF Reader.

Make It The Default Application

Right-click a PDF file and select the context menu option Properties. In the properties dialog box, select the Open with tabl. Here, click the Add button. This will bring up an Add Application dialog. In the Use a custom command box, enter the command you had created earlier for the linker. Finally, close all the dialogs. After you do these steps, you can click any PDF document and have it opened in Free PDF Reader.

Create a Context Menu Option

When you make Free PDF Reader the default PDF application, there is one side effect. The context menu for PDF files will have the default option set to an uncool "java" instead of "Free PDF Reader."

If you would rather have a regular context menu option that says "Open with Free PDF Reader" for PDF files, as shown below, then need to install Nautilus Actions Configuration from your Linux repository.

In Nautilus Actions Configuration, I created create a new "Nautilus Action":

In the Action tab, I gave the Context Label as Open with Free PDF Reader.
For the Path box in the Command tab, I entered java -jar /home/subuntu/freepdfreader/FreePDFReader.jar and %M in Parameters.
In the Conditions tab, I entered *.pdf in the Filenames, unchecked Match Case, and entered application/pdf in Mimetypes.

Optimize For Heavy Loads

Java applications are expected to have a very low memory footprint. This can cause Free PDF Reader to fail when loading huge PDF documents. To enable Free PDF Reader to load big PDF files, you need to add two extra parameters to the java command - to increase the minimum and maximum heap size allocated to the Java Virtual Machine.

java -jar -Xms32m -Xmx128m [installation folder]/FreePDFReader.jar

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