Linux, LDAP and the impossibility of handling editable PDFs

[Konrad Heuer]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2008, O. Hartmann wrote:

> 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 ...

I use a simple workaround to make the Adobe reader (and some other Linux 
binaries) work - I simply added following entries to the crontab file of 
root:

00 05  *  *  * /usr/bin/getent passwd | /usr/bin/sed '1,/nobody/d' > /usr/compat/linux/etc/passwd 2> /dev/null
15 05  *  *  * /usr/bin/getent group > /usr/compat/linux/etc/group 2> /dev/null

Hope that helps a little bit ...

Best regards

Konrad Heuer
GWDG, Am Fassberg, 37077 Goettingen, Germany, kheuer2 at gwdg.de