Foxit Reader for amd64 Linux

Foxit Reader is my favorite pdf reader when I was a Windows XP user. It has superior performance and much lighter than Adobe Reader. I wouldn't say Adobe Reader for Linux is worse, but most of the time I just want to read my pdf document without any special functions, therefore, I would definitely choose Foxit Reader on my Linux.

Foxit Reader for Linux provides three types of binries: bz2, rpm and deb. Though the rpm and deb files are for i386 only, they can still be installed on amd64(x86_64). Debian users may find it not that direct to install i386 deb, the complaint message is architecture conflicting. To resolve this issue for Debian, a force option is a must:

dpkg --force-architecture -i FoxitReader_1.1.0_i386.deb

However, followed by launching FoxitReader is an error message:

error while loading shared libraries: libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

No need to be panic. Let's check if we really miss this library:

locate libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0

and my Ubuntu did have this library:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.10

The root reason for the missing-shared-object message is that the FoxitReader was built for i386 Linux thus it needs i386 version of libgtk-x11. What you gotta do is to install libs for i386:

aptitude install libgtk2.0-0:i386 libstdc++6:i386

For Debian amd64 users, some obstacles may be encountered. Debian amd64 will not allow users to install an i386 deb, therefore you need to let dpkg search i386 packages by executing:

dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt-get update

to let Debian amd64 aware i386 repository. For other distributions, the package name will be similar libgtk2.0.i386 or something like that. The command of it is FoxitReader, now you may feel free to use Foxit Reader on your Linux.

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