You can view PDF (Portable Document Format) documents in a Linux environment using several applications. Depending on your needs, we recommend LibreOffice if you need to edit a PDF and Evince if you need to view a PDF.
LibreOffice Writer, which is part of the open source LibreOffice suite, does a great job opening, viewing, editing, and writing PDF documents.
Debian and Ubuntu both use the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) package management system. In your terminal, run the following command to install the LibreOffice software package:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libreoffice
In CentOS, download the LibreOffice package from the LibreOffice website that is appropriate for your system architecture. For instance, in this example, we downloaded LibreOffice_5.1.4_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz, an RPM (RPM Package Manager) package of LibreOffice 5.1.4 for 64-bit computers. The destination folder for the download is our Downloads directory.
Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where you downloaded the archive. For example:
cd ~/Downloads
The archive is a gzipped tar file. Extract it.
tar -xzvf LibreOffice_5.1.4_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz
The archive directory structure is extracted to the current directory. Change to the directory containing the RPMs:
cd LibreOffice_5.1.4.2_Linux_x86-64_rpm/RPMS/
Use the yum package manager to install all the RPM packages. Any required dependencies are also downloaded and installed.
sudo yum localinstall *.rpm
Installing LibreOffice on Fedora is similar to installing on CentOS. First, download the RPM archive for your machine architecture from https://www.libreoffice.org. In this case, we downloaded the same 64-bit RPM archive as above, LibreOffice_5.1.4_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz.
Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the archive. For example:
cd ~/Downloads
Extract the archive.
tar -xzvf LibreOffice_5.1.4_Linux_x86-64_rpm.tar.gz
Navigate to the directory containing the RPMs.
cd LibreOffice_5.1.4.2_Linux_x86-64_rpm/RPMS/
Install all RPMs with the dnf package management tool. Dnf is similar to yum, but the command syntax is slightly different for installing local packages:
sudo dnf install *.rpm
OpenSUSE uses the zypper package management tool. From your terminal, run:
sudo zypper install libreoffice
Arch Linux uses the pacman package manager. To install LibreOffice, run:
sudo pacman -S libreoffice
su -c "pacman -S libreoffice"
Choose the package libreoffice-fresh or libreoffice-still. For the newest features, choose libreoffice-fresh. For the version that is the most reliably stable, choose libreoffice-still.
Evince is a lightweight program that loads and renders PDF documents in a clean, precise manner. You may prefer it to LibreOffice if all you need to do is view a PDF.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install evince
sudo yum install evince
sudo dnf install evince
sudo zypper install evince
sudo pacman -S evince
Or, if your Arch system does not have sudo:
su -c "pacman -S evince"
