Wednesday 19 January 2011

Adobe Acrobat administrator passwords on OS X

I've been having this problem for a very long time. I install adobe Acrobat professional 8 on the master image and it asks for the admin password the first time it is run by anybody! This is OK if you know the admin password but of course students don't. So, here's the main part of my investigations and one solution (there are more).


I found a few forums discussing the same issues and it apparently occurs on version 8 on OS X. It looks like the application needs to run a fixing program if it can't see a few files where it expects them, and this fixing program requires admin password. Forum here.


The forum gets a little confusing and I really don't want to read it again, a lot of crossed wires and such. So, the files involved is: ~user/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.80.sh.plist

So I logged in as an admin user, ran Acrobat, put in password and if fixed itself (for that user). Then I copied this file and put it in an active directory users library and loaded up Acrobat. It worked! So, the easiest way to stop it is to make sure users have this file.

My plan is to put it in Workgroup Managers > Managed Preferences. Then it should work for all users.

... the next day ...
Yay, I tried it with the managed preferences and it worked. Looks like there is another file for the newer version: ~user/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.acrobat.90.sh.plist

No comments:

Post a Comment