Casper H.S. Dik wrote:

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

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).

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?

Sorry, we've become a bit OT ...

>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.

>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.

>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.

Regards

fw

Marc wrote:

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

I think you can try any of the PDFs from docs.sun.com.
But also out of curiosity, isn't libfreetype that part of the game which is
responsible for proper display of all the stuff? As I was using the old
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, my new xpdf did:

root@rayserv# ldd /opt/xpdf/bin/xpdf
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/sfw/lib/libfreetype.so.6
libXm.so.4 => /usr/lib/libXm.so.4
libXt.so.4 => /usr/openwin/lib/libXt.so.4
libXp.so.1 => /usr/openwin/lib/libXp.so.1
libXext.so.0 => /usr/openwin/lib/libXext.so.0
libXpm.so.4 => /usr/openwin/lib/libXpm.so.4
libSM.so.6 => /usr/openwin/lib/libSM.so.6
libICE.so.6 => /usr/openwin/lib/libICE.so.6
libX11.so.4 => /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4
libsocket.so.1 => /lib/libsocket.so.1
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/sfw/lib/libstdc++.so.6
libm.so.2 => /lib/libm.so.2
libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/sfw/lib/libgcc_s.so.1
libc.so.1 => /lib/libc.so.1
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1
libXtsol.so.1 => /usr/openwin/lib/libXtsol.so.1
libtsol.so.2 => /lib/libtsol.so.2
libdl.so.1 => /lib/libdl.so.1
libmp.so.2 => /lib/libmp.so.2
libmd5.so.1 => /lib/libmd5.so.1
libscf.so.1 => /lib/libscf.so.1
libdoor.so.1 => /lib/libdoor.so.1
libsecdb.so.1 => /lib/libsecdb.so.1
libuutil.so.1 => /lib/libuutil.so.1
libgen.so.1 => /lib/libgen.so.1
libcmd.so.1 => /lib/libcmd.so.1
root@rayserv#

.... and gpdf is using the same libfreetype. Might that be part of the problem?

[...]

Indeed - after really using the new libfreetype, things look very much
better! Now I can read the contents.

So my /usr/sfw/lib/libfreetype is crappy ...

Regards and thanks for the constructive discussion ...

fw

I wrote:

>Indeed - after really using the new libfreetype, things look very much
>better! Now I can read the contents.

Well ... the Sun PDFs are ok now but the MySQL manual consists of more or
less blank pages.

Regards

fw

Frank Winkler wrote:

> >Indeed - after really using the new libfreetype, things look very much
> >better! Now I can read the contents.

freetype is indeed responsible for the rendering of the text.

By the way, in freetype, if you read the build instructions carefully,
there are instructions on how to enable an improvement that is not
enabled by default for legal reasons, you might also want to look into
that.

> Well ... the Sun PDFs are ok now but the MySQL manual consists of more or
> less blank pages.

I picked one randomly on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ (english A4 v6.0) and
it looks great with xpdf on this debian box. Pages 1 and 3 are almost
empty, but that is normal. Which manual did you fail to read?

John Groenveld wrote:
> 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>
>

yes, and i use it even on sparc's sunrays servers...
Evince has search functionnality, and copy/paste, (and it is faster than
acroread on sparc)
before using evince, i was giving a try to acroread 5 with lxrun, and
never succeed in printing.
I don't think Sun is interested in having people running solaris for
sunrays server, as the desktop is very a crap (CDE or JDS). When you
look at the sunrays list, the majority of people talk about linux (or
windows). Running solaris (like me) seems to be a "no-future" action...

Marc wrote:

>By the way, in freetype, if you read the build instructions carefully,
>there are instructions on how to enable an improvement that is not
>enabled by default for legal reasons, you might also want to look into
>that.

Thanks for the hint, I'll do that!

>I picked one randomly on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ (english A4 v6.0) and
>it looks great with xpdf on this debian box. Pages 1 and 3 are almost
>empty, but that is normal. Which manual did you fail to read?

mysql-refman-5.0-en.a4.pdf

Regards

fw

Frank Winkler wrote:

> >I picked one randomly on http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ (english A4 v6.0) and
> >it looks great with xpdf on this debian box. Pages 1 and 3 are almost
> >empty, but that is normal. Which manual did you fail to read?
>
> mysql-refman-5.0-en.a4.pdf

I got refman-5.0-en.a4.pdf from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/ and it shows up
perfectly well in xpdf on linux (debian testing). I also started xpdf
remotely on a solaris 9 sparc and it worked fine through ssh forwarding.
I don't know what is failing for you, sorry :-(

In article <476b6560$0$19781$426a74cc@news.free.fr>,
jdh13 <jdh13@free.fr> wrote:
>I don't think Sun is interested in having people running solaris for
>sunrays server, as the desktop is very a crap (CDE or JDS). When you

Do you think JDS has improved in Solaris Express?

John
groenveld@acm.org

In article <476e5cc3$0$85794$e4fe514c@news.xs4all.nl>,
Casper H.S. Dik <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM> wrote:
>I don't think we agree with that because a lot of work is put into it;
>perhaps you are just looking at S10 and it's aging GNOME/JDS; the future
>of Solaris has a much newer version of GNOME and is by and large not
>much different from Linux in desktop capabilities.

When Anil Gadre and company's marketing wonks demo Sun's desktop
solutions to customers, which OS do they use to serve the Sun Ray's?

Are there any plans to integrate the SRSS bits with Express?

John
groenveld@acm.org

John Groenveld wrote:
> In article <476b6560$0$19781$426a74cc@news.free.fr>,
> jdh13 <jdh13@free.fr> wrote:
>> I don't think Sun is interested in having people running solaris for
>> sunrays server, as the desktop is very a crap (CDE or JDS). When you
>
> Do you think JDS has improved in Solaris Express?
>

i don't give it a try on Sunrays, because i need a stable platform. I'm
using Solaris Express on my laptop, and yes, JDS is very fine (for
example, ekiga works immediatly, for the first time!). But it is also
"memory hog", 768Mb RAM is the minimal to have JDS, thunderbird,
mozilla, staroffice, and apache2:

kthr memory page disk faults cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr cd -- -- -- in sy cs
us sy id
0 0 0 441388 11468 0 2 0 0 0 0 6354 0 0 0 0 756 12259 5932
48 22 30
0 0 0 441004 11096 0 0 0 0 0 0 8427 1 0 0 0 774 13471 5549
48 22 30

PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
1115 henry 240M 89M sleep 49 0 0:00:04 0,3% soffice.bin/6
1045 henry 239M 100M run 42 0 0:02:45 40% firefox-bin/9
1069 henry 189M 109M sleep 49 0 0:00:10 0,0%
thunderbird-bin/11
575 henry 183M 73M run 42 0 0:01:05 23% Xorg/1

after time, Xorg also eats memory. These facts appears regularly on
forums, so i'm not incitated to use SX in prod environment, even after
buying new machines (in case i'll get funds fro that)

gerard