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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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> 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.