Acrobat Reader (acroread) firefox plugin crashes npviewer.bin

[nicolaasuni]

Binary package hint: nspluginwrapper

When opening PDF documents using Firefox and Acrobat Reader plugin, very often the npviewer.bin process crashes and Firefox display changing garbage on the windows. There is no way to directly stop or kill the acroread process, I have to kill the npviewer.bin process and reload the document to be able to see it.
Closing the Firefox tab containing the PDF document doesn't end the npviewer.bin process, nor the acrobat process.

Due to this situation, using the acroread plugin with firefox is almost impossible because crashes too often and you have to keep killing npviewer.bin process. This is really frustrating an makes Firefox unusable to view PDF documents (note that PDF plugins other than Acrobat doesn't yet implement the full PDF standard and are not an alternative).

I'm using:
* Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) for AMD64 bit (Linux nickmain 2.6.35-25-server #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 21 19:09:14 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux).
* Mozilla Firefox (firefox 3.6.13+build3+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.10.10.1).
* nspluginwrapper (1.2.2-0ubuntu7).
* Adobe Acrobat Reader (acroread 9.4.1-1maverick1).

[nicolaasuni (info-tecnick)]

Note: this problem happens in all my Ubuntu 10.10 amd64 installations.

[nicolaasuni (info-tecnick)]

Probably this is the same bug reported at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acroread/+bug/571247

A lot of the following errors were reported on .xsession-errors log:

(acroread:5152): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: invalid uninstantiatable type `(null)' in cast to `GObject'
(acroread:5152): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: instance of invalid non-instantiatable type `(null)'
(acroread:5152): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_signal_handlers_disconnect_matched: assertion `G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed
(acroread:5152): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_destroy: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

[Scott Talbert (swt-techie)]

Hi, are you sure that npviewer.bin is actually crashing? I think that if it was crashing, it would be gone and you would not be able to kill it.

When the issue occurs, if you run "ps -ef | grep acroread", does it show that acroread is a zombie? If so, this is the same as 571247.

[nicolaasuni (info-tecnick)]

Yes, probably the problem lies in acroread:

$ ps -ef | grep acroread
nick 9270 9259 33 13:11 ? 00:00:28 [acroread] <defunct>

[Jorge Suárez de Lis (ys)]

I'm marking this as a duplicate of #571247. I hope that's ok.