I broke down and wanted to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on my FC6 box to replace xpdf. After installing it from the tar.gz version the acroread startup script bombed out with the error: expr substr 2400000000000 1
After a little searching I didn't find much help so I started looking at the script myself to see if I could track down the problem. It turns out that it wasn't that hard to fix. First off the script file was located at: /usr/bin/acroread
Open the script file and find the function named "check_gtk_ver_and_set_lib_path". This is the location of the first error you will hit. To fix the error you will need to change:
base_version=`expr substr "${base_version}0000000000" 1 $len_version`
to
blah1="${base_version}0000000000"
base_version=${blah1:1:$len_version}
You will find this two places and it needs to be changed in both. If you don't notice the 2nd place it is right after the first in a loop:
while [ $len_version -gt $len_base_version ]; do
The second problem you will have is located in the function "get_gtk_file_ver". Find this function and change the following line:
echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
to
echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)000.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
Now you should be able to run acroread without errors.
Attempting to upgrade my reader from 7.0.8 I received the error message 1714 "Adobe reader 8 cannot be removed. Contact your terch support group. I cand use the old version, and can't install an update. How to resolve?
The second set of script that you suggested to change seems same, please see below which I copied from:
………….following line:
echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)00.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
to
echo $mfile| sed 's/libgtk-x11-\([0-9]*\).0.so.0.\([0-9]\)000.\([0-9]*\)\|\(.*\)/\1\2\3/g'
Would you please double check if the above is error?
By the way, I have upgraded FC4 to FC5 & FC6 now. My problem when try to install the latest acrobat reder, AdobeReader_jpn-7.0.9-1.i386.rpm, is that I get error that says "file /usr/bin/acroread from install of AdobeReader_jpn-7.0.9-1 conflicts with file from package acroread-7.0.5-2.2.fc4.rf".
So, I thought that your suggestion might solve my problem here.
Would you please give me your comment?
Thank you,
Regards,
Shigeru
That should work. One thing I forgot to put in the post is that I was using the tgz file and not the rpm. It could be that they have different scripts.
Thank you very much for posting this fix. It worked like a charm!