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Hi there !

Unfortunately, I had to migrate our SunRay-Server away from a SPARC onto an
AMD box. So far, so good - but the lack of AcroRead and the fact that gpdf
is a real PITA are becoming more and more disturbing.

The current "solution" is acroread through a ssh tunnel but that's not
really cool. Allegedly, Evince is much better than gpdf but I didn't get it
running yet.

Does anybody know if the current x64 hype will have any influence on the
availability of a Solaris/x64 build of AcroRead? Or what about the Linux
binary compatibility libs which have finally made it into HW 08/2007? Could
that be a reliable solution?

TIA

fw

Frank Winkler <frank-usenet@kfw-family.org> writes:

>Unfortunately, I had to migrate our SunRay-Server away from a SPARC onto an
>AMD box. So far, so good - but the lack of AcroRead and the fact that gpdf
>is a real PITA are becoming more and more disturbing.

Yes, that is still a large issue for Solaris/x86 customers.

Acroread 8.1.1 is also only available on SPARC (and is quite a pita to
install because it requires you to find all kinds of libraries it needs;
some of which are indeed not part of S10 but on Solaris Nevada it should
just run out of the box)

>The current "solution" is acroread through a ssh tunnel but that's not
>really cool. Allegedly, Evince is much better than gpdf but I didn't get it
>running yet.

>Does anybody know if the current x64 hype will have any influence on the
>availability of a Solaris/x64 build of AcroRead? Or what about the Linux
>binary compatibility libs which have finally made it into HW 08/2007? Could
>that be a reliable solution?

Your guess is as good as ours; they have not wanted to do the work
until now and say so in the Acroread FAQ (or blog someplace)
I'd certainly suggest asking Adobe for it.

The Linux branded zone can run one form of acroread but it will need some
setting up before you can have an automatically started acroread in the
zone and give it access to a system which looks locally.

I'm not sure what else you mean with "Linux compatibility libs".


Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Frank Winkler wrote:

> >Acroread 8.1.1 is also only available on SPARC (and is quite a pita to
> >install because it requires you to find all kinds of libraries it needs;
> >some of which are indeed not part of S10 but on Solaris Nevada it should
> >just run out of the box)
>
> I know - I once tried to upgrade v7 to v8 and found exactly that.

Have you tried using xpdf? It works quite well, usually much faster than
its derivatives like evince. You could also try jpedal (never tried it
myself).

> >The Linux branded zone can run one form of acroread but it will need some
>
> I don't have any deeper knowledge about how this Linux thing should/will
> work. So it's a separate zone running a Linux instance? I thought it's a
> run-time "wrapper" inside Solaris which is capable of executing the Linux
> binary.

It does not work like the freebsd linux emulation.

> >setting up before you can have an automatically started acroread in the
> >zone and give it access to a system which looks locally.
>
> So in fact, it's more or less the same as the ssh tunnel to another box.

Except that you should get the same kind of performance as with a local
software, whereas remote display can be really slow if you don't use
something like NX to make it faster.

Frank Winkler <frank-usenet@kfw-family.org> writes:

>That's the software issue. And from a hardware point of view, I don't like
>the "PC architecture". No real serial console (just funny toys like Web
>based GUIs etc.), no OBP (just a BIOS which insist on reading the MBR from
>one special disk).

True enough (apparently the Soekris boxes have a command line prompt in their
BIOS)

>The x64 CPUs are ok as an alternative (even if I like the SPARC machines
>better) but why are they only delivered with the legacy PC stuff around
>them? I'm not a hardware expert but wouldn't it be possible to just replace
>the CPU and leave the surroundings alone? Is there any dependency between
>intel/AMD processors and all the BIOS stuff around it?

Well, in an ideal world.....

The reality is that a large chunk of the PC market is systems running Windows;
and we'd rather sell OUR hardware to run Windows than not sell the
hardware. By making sure our hardware fits the "PC model" that is just
fine.

I must admit that I think the ILOM based systems are passable in that the
remote console is pretty function (BIOS over serial is always fairly crappy,
especially when they start to insist on hitting F2 for setup which often

just doesn't work)

>I don't have any deeper knowledge about how this Linux thing should/will
>work. So it's a separate zone running a Linux instance? I thought it's a
>run-time "wrapper" inside Solaris which is capable of executing the Linux
>binary.

There used to be a thing called "lxrun"; but the branded zone is actually
a zone with a Linux system call emulation layer in it.

>So in fact, it's more or less the same as the ssh tunnel to another box.

Yep, just one less box to worry about.

Casper
--
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Marc wrote:

>Have you tried using xpdf? It works quite well, usually much faster than
>its derivatives like evince. You could also try jpedal (never tried it
>myself).

I hadn't but after reading your posting, I just tried to compile it but
with no success. It doesn't like the FreeType supplied with Solaris.
The mein problem with gpdf is that many (especially Sun supplied) PDFs are
unreadable and that there's no search function. Is the original xpdf better
here?

Regards

fw

Frank Winkler wrote:

> >Have you tried using xpdf? It works quite well, usually much faster than
> >its derivatives like evince. You could also try jpedal (never tried it
> >myself).
>
> I hadn't but after reading your posting, I just tried to compile it but
> with no success. It doesn't like the FreeType supplied with Solaris.

Ah, too bad. I guess you would rather not install all the blastwave
dependencies if you tried to compile it. What error did you get? I think
it should work, although you may have to specify
--with-freetype2-library=/usr/sfw/lib
--with-freetype2-includes=/usr/sfw/include to the configure script.

> The mein problem with gpdf is that many (especially Sun supplied) PDFs are
> unreadable and that there's no search function. Is the original xpdf better
> here?

Well it does have a search feature. Other than that, it is hard to say
whether it would suit you if you can't try it.

Marc wrote:

>Ah, too bad. I guess you would rather not install all the blastwave
>dependencies if you tried to compile it. What error did you get? I think
>it should work, although you may have to specify
>--with-freetype2-library=/usr/sfw/lib
>--with-freetype2-includes=/usr/sfw/include to the configure script.

That's what I had. Then I compiled freetype (does xpdf try to link against
libfreetype statically or dynamically?). No change, Basically, I still get:

configure: WARNING: requested freetype2 library not found!

no matter if I supply the dir containing the lib or the lib file.

[...]

Silly me!!! It was just a typo: I forgot the trailing "s" in
"--with-freetype2-includes" so it was a matter of headers instead of libs.
Fixed that and it configures and compiles. I suppose it also would with
Sun's FreeType.

xpdf looks nice, significantly different from gpdf (which I thought is a
derivative of xpdf). BUT it still doesn't display most PDFs properly. I
just get unreadable garbage on the screen. The same file with acroread
looks fine.

Regards

fw

In article <5ssa24F19fnm3U1@mid.individual.net>,
Frank Winkler <frank-usenet@kfw-family.org> wrote:
>The current "solution" is acroread through a ssh tunnel but that's not
>really cool. Allegedly, Evince is much better than gpdf but I didn't get it
>running yet.

I am happy with Blastwave's evince package.
<URL:http://www.blastwave.org/packages.php/evince>

John
groenveld@acm.org

In article <476929cf$0$85792$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>,
Casper H.S. Dik <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM> wrote:
>The reality is that a large chunk of the PC market is systems running Windows;
>and we'd rather sell OUR hardware to run Windows than not sell the
>hardware. By making sure our hardware fits the "PC model" that is just
>fine.

Anil Gadre and company's "no barrier to exit" marketing for
Sun's x64 systems resonates with the PHBs in my little corner of
the world.

John
groenveld@acm.org

Frank Winkler wrote:

> Silly me!!! It was just a typo: I forgot the trailing "s" in
> "--with-freetype2-includes" so it was a matter of headers instead of libs.
> Fixed that and it configures and compiles. I suppose it also would with
> Sun's FreeType.

:-)

> xpdf looks nice, significantly different from gpdf (which I thought is a
> derivative of xpdf). BUT it still doesn't display most PDFs properly. I
> just get unreadable garbage on the screen. The same file with acroread
> looks fine.

Ok, too bad. Out of curiosity, could you post a link to a couple such
PDFs?

I remember once having a PDF file that acroread could not read whereas
xpdf could, because the PDF did not include some non-standard fonts it
was using and acroread did not look for the fonts in the system.

It has been quite some time since I last saw a PDF I could not read with
xpdf, but then I mostly read PDF generated by pdflatex (nothing too
fancy).

Good luck with getting Adobe support for solaris-x86 (there is still the
jpedal option worth trying, the free version is a bit hard to find on
their website, but it is a completely different codebase than xpdf so it
might not have issues with the same PDF).