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I am a bit new in Ubuntu, I installed it a week ago and I have some things more or less set but I am struggling with a couple things, if somebody kindly helpme.

  1. I have installed chromium-browser which I like more than firefox because of I think it is faster, but in my University's virtual room they have some PDF files uploaded and chromium-browser won't open them directly online, it forces to download, I have installed flash player because of I wasn't able to view youtube videos but is there another plugin or component which allow me to open pdf files without downloading? thank you
  2. Additional to that minor problem, when I want to download something in direct download, I haven't tried torrent but I don't want such solution, is there a way to download the files faster without using any software for that task? I mean: setting up something in the software. All I find are programs. Thank you

Cheers.

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    Can you instead ask each question separately?
    – Braiam
    Sep 21, 2013 at 15:39
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    Alberto. Tu pregunta esta recibiendo calificaciones negativas debido a que pusiste dos preguntas juntas. Puedes por favor hacer una pregunta individual en cada caso? Gracias! Sep 21, 2013 at 15:43

6 Answers 6

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First of all, Welcome to AskUbuntu. And I suggest you to make just one question at once in order to receive the proper support, preferably in English. If you write in Spanish the answers to your question may delay until somebody translate your question.

I can partially answer your question specifically in the first point, related to your issue with the PDF Files and Chromium Browser.

Chromium Browser does not have an embedded PDF reader as Google Chrome does. That's why you won't be able to do anything in order to read your online PDF's directly on the browser and you are forced to download them insted.

You can -anyway- try to install Google Chrome, and copy the respective Google Chrome plugins to your current Chromium Browser in order to make Chromium able to open PDF's directly by following the steps provided in this previous answer by @shaneonabike, please note that in the comments @DanielHershcovich mentions that it will be better if you make a symbolic link to the plugins instead of copying, but this will be useful if you plan to keep both Google Chrome and Chromium Browser. If you plan to uninstall Google Chrome, you may wish to run the steps as mentioned by @shaneonabike, reproduced here for your convenience:

You have two solutions that I can see here (applied to Ubuntu 11.10) [This was inspired by comments above and other sources I found]

  • Install Chrome and then copy over *.so files which technically gets you around the legality issues

Here's how I did that...

  1. Close Chromium
  2. Download Chrome from Chrome distro
  3. Install it on your Ubuntu release
  4. cd /usr/lib/chromium-browser/
  5. sudo cp /opt/google/chrome/*.so .
  6. Start Chromium

Note: The new plugins never showed up in my extension listing but suddenly just started working properly. By copy all *.so you are getting support for Flash, FFMPEG, and PDF support.

If you want to copy each individual item here is a listing of them for you to hand pick.

  • libffmpegsumo.so - ffmpeg
  • libgcflashplayer.so - Flash
  • libpdf.so - PDF

I must warn you that Google Chrome and its plugins are non-free software, but this workaround seems not to be harmful at all. (Tested by me).

As of your second question I can't provide you with any solution but I suggest you to open a new question about it in order to receive the proper support from other users.

Good luck!

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To view pdf's embedded in the browser you can install the PDF Viewer extension from Chrome Web Store. Uses HTML5 to display PDF files directly in the browser.

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You just need to install the PDF Viewer extension in your Chromium web browser. PDF Viewer uses HTML5 to display PDF files directly in the web browser.

  1. In the URL address bar type: chrome://extensions/
  2. Click on the link that says: Get more extensions.
  3. Search for PDF Viewer.
  4. Install
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It's not necessary to install Chrome, just download the DEB file and extract the required library files, for example, where the deb has been downloaded to your ~/Downloads path:

#> ar p ~/Downloads/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb data.tar.lzma | tar --lzma -xvf - ./opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so --transform='s/.*\///'
#> cp libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium-browser

Just check the file ownership/permissions after the copy.

As to the second question: will 'wget' do what you need? I can be invoked from a script to download an HTTP resource.

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First you need to download the needed files, in this case it is the official Chrome browser. You can get it by running the following, or downloading the .deb package directly at https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/ and choosing 32 or 64bit Debian/Ubuntu package depending on whether you use a 64 or 32bit Linux OS.

You can also do the following from a terminal:

For 64Bit:

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

For 32Bit:

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb

Extract the .deb package

What you just downloaded was a Debian package, you can see it as an “archive” like a .zip or .tar.gz, if that makes more sense to you. You need to extract it, since the one file we need is hidden deep inside it.

Extract it by running the following in the terminal:

ar xv <filename of downloaded file>

Example:

ar xv google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

This will get you 3 new files, in the same location as you first file. They are named the following: control.tar.gz data.tar.lzma debian-binary

What we are interested in here is the data.tar.lzma file, this is another “archive” and we also have to extract this, using the following command:

tar --lzma -xvf data.tar-lzma

This time you get some folder, with a lot of subfolders and files, the 3 top folder are named: etc opt usr

In all this, we are only interested in 1 file, opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so

Copy the needed file to you Chromium install folder

copy it to your Chromium install folder using the “cp” command:

The folder might not be exactly the same for you, depending on your Chromium version and OS. but for me it’s /usr/lib/chromium/ and should be something like that for you, just type in “/usr/lib/chr” and press the TAB key on your keyboard to make it type the rest.

cp opt/google/chrome/libpdf.so /usr/lib/chromium/

When that’s done, close all your open Chromium browsers Reopen Chromium and type the following in your address bar:

about:plugins

And make sure Chrome PDF Viewer is checked

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For the newer Chromimum, search pdf in Chromium setting. Disable download PDF instead of automatically opening them in Chrome as shown below.

enter image description here

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  • I tried this but it didn't work in chromium 89.0.4389.114.
    – Ricardo
    Apr 13, 2021 at 18:06

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