Linux, LDAP and the impossibility of handling editable PDFs

[O. Hartmann]

Several months ago I tried configuring the Linuxulator on several 
FreeBSD 7.X boxes, most of them pure amd64 and pure 64 bit (as it is 
possible with Intels pseudo 64 bit crap). The reason for that is simple. 
Having FreeBSD (now 7.1-PRE) as my favorite OS on servers AND hybrid 
boxes (acting as workstations AND small servers) makes life easy - I 
thought and was touhgt wrong.
Our administration sends a lot of PDFs around and as it is very usual, 
our applications, forms and so on for scientific congresses etc. are all 
PDF and subject to be edited. And here it comes that FreeBSD seems to be 
a definite deadend!
Using pdfedit is wrong, it can't show or edit any PDF we obtained so 
far. Using 'pdftk' fails, it is not made to run in modern 64 bit 
environments only when using FreeBSD (linux seems to have no problem, 
especially Ubuntu does the thing). So, then I remembered myself about 
Linuxulator and tried acrobatviewer - and failed. As in other 
professional environments we were far away from using simple user 
management and therefore there is a LDAP environment. And, funny, 
Linuxulator does not contact LDAP even if  I try to configure it to use 
our LDAP environment. Digging around what flavor of Linux FreeBSD 
installs (means: do al ot of work), reading about how to use PAM and 
LDAP on Linux (means: doing again additional work in an environment I 
try to avoid!) and at last no success, because something is missing or 
the Linuxulator should use something for user authentication and 
autorization it does not have and uses therefore the FreeBSD stuff and 
then fails. Especially for the Acrobat weirdness (or call it software) 
something like this occurs whenn attempting starting acrobat reader:

(acroread:18831): GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown 
user id (2001)

(acroread:18831): Gdk-WARNING **: shmget failed: error 12 (Cannot 
allocate memory)


If there is someone here running a 64 bit environment within a LDAP 
realm and already got successfully running the Linux add ons as expected 
for LDAP users, you are really welcome to give me some hints how to turn 
around my frustration and thoughts about definitely leaving the FreeBSD 
path ...

Thanks in advance,

Oliver