[MacTUG] Acrobat Pro on managed macs

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

I have to keep telling me that my hatred of Adobe is not because I am under Job’s ‘reality distortion field’, because while Adobe is slowly driving me insane, the main culprit is NOT Flash, haha!!!

I have been beating my head against the wall to try to get Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 to work with managed macs (using OD/AD to authenticate) and I just cannot get it to work. Does anybody out there have experience with this?

I can get it to work if I do a ‘monolithic install’ of building a disk image with everything on it, but I have stopped doing this, using Composer to create packages to install on top of my base image. And I am not going to have some puky PDF application reverse my progress! I now regret that we own it and I am seriously considering not installing it if I cannot figure this out. (It occasionally comes in handy for students needing to modify/merge/etc pdfs and to print oversized pdfs in a tiled manner.)

There is a lot out there about how hard it is to install in a managed environment, for example, until I had this problem I never really noticed that the install process for acrobat is fundamentally different than the rest of the CS packages. Apparently the team that builds Acrobat are not part of the ‘normal’ CS team and it sounds like the operate with a bit of impunity. Enough gossip. Here are some paths I have travelled down.


 1.  I have checked the Composer forums and posted there. The only possible solutions I have heard from them involve using Composer with the much more expensive Casper Solution that JAMF sells and I am not going to go there.
 2.  I have ‘broken down’ and installed Acrobat into my ‘base OS install’ and then tried to install the rest of the apps as packages on top of that. The problem is when I install word, firefox, etc, Acrobat when it starts up wants to install plugins into all of these apps, and fires up a Admin/Password dialog box.
 3.  There are a lot of links out there stating that if you edit the file /Applications/Adobe Reader.app/Contents/MacOS/RdrENU80SelfHeal.xml and replace all instances of “YES” or “REQUIRED” with “NO” you can turn off its nightmarish ‘self-healing’ features. But there seem to be as many people that are not helped by this solution as are helped, and quite a few folks say updating Acrobat to 8.13 ‘broke’ this hack.
 4.  There is lots of talk about ‘silent installs’ but I found this rather a dead end.
 5.  There is a lot more talk about it for Acrobat Pro 9 — it sounds like the problem has gotten worse than better.

At any rate, I am NOT paying to upgrade acrobat pro to the latest version -- and I am pissed off at Adobe that I am thinking I will stick with whatever photoshop came in CS3, thank you very much ;-)

I have trolled around the internet enough that I certainly do not want anyone wasting there time on that, but has anyone had personal experiences building a package with Acrobat and installing it in a non-monolithic way?

I am ready to say adios to the cursed application!

</rant> (I know I forgot my <rant> tag, I did not know where the rant started, haha)

don


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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environmental Studies
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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