Adobe Reader problem in running: internal error

I just have installed adobe reader using apt-get install acroread. but it does not run, and shows this message: An Internal Error Occured

3 Answers

This seems to be a problem with file permissions for the acroread program. Specifically, on starting up it tries to create a folder .adobe in your home directory. However, due to some reason (perhaps during install) a symlink file of the same name already exists: .adobe --> /dev/null. So, the program throws and error and quits, as seen by running it from the terminal:

$ acroread

Acroread was unable to create the directory .adobe in your home directory. There may be a permission problem with the parent directory.

ls -l ~/.adobe
.adobe -> /dev/null

So to solve this problem, just remove the symlink with:

rm -v ~/.adobe

Now try starting acroread, and it should work fine.

The answer above did nothing for me; I can delete the .acroread folder and Acrobat creates a new one, still fails with errors. My environment matches this bug report

[

which points out that Adobe has a bug reading the its own config from an XFS file system larger than 1T. The thread author provides workarounds for bash and tcsh:

[bash]
HOME=`/bin/mktemp --directory` acroread
[(t)csh]
(setenv HOME `/bin/mktemp --directory`; acroread)

This was the first solution I found that worked for me. Note that this solution isn't perfect, Acrobat treats every launch as the first one, asked you to acknowledge the EULA, etc. The author also provides a shell script to try and work around that issue.

I had the same problem with acroread on a XFS partition with more than 1 TB.

I copied the directory /home/<homedir>/.adobe to a smaller partition and made a symlink /home/<homedir>/.adobe on the copied directory.

After that, acroread works fine.