My retired dad runs Linux exclusively on his Thinkpad laptop. I'm front line tech support for him.

He lives a few hours away, so I don't always know exactly what he's experiencing with his laptop, or how a particular problem arose, of which there have been few.

Here's the solution I found for a recently reported problem opening PDFs on Mandriva Linux with Firefox.

The symptom was that after a PDF link was clicked, a blank white browser would open, and then...nothing. No feedback, no error message.

I determined that Acrobat Reader and the plugin for it for already installed, as was KPDF, which I prefer.

The symptom indicate that something was trying to happen, but failing. I correctly suspected a bad connection with the Acrobat Reader plugin.

The solution I gave him over the phone was to use the terminal to unceremiously delete the Acrobat Reader plugin. It worked. After re-starting Firefox, he was prompted to open the PDFs with KPDF instead, which worked fine. Here are the specific details for the deletion.


Alt-F2 konsole
su
rm /usr/lib/netscape/plugins/nppdf.so
rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/nppdf.so


Using the Software removal tool to remove the offending would have been a cleaner solution, but this certainly worked.

I'm still not sure what caused the failure in the first place-- I know Linux often ships now with working PDF solution pre-installed.