Linux, LDAP and the impossibility of handling editable PDFs

[O. Hartmann]

Konrad Heuer wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 

Thank you very much, this works.
But this seems to be a hack, unclean in my opinion. As I got responses 
earlier of the year for a similar problem, Linuxulator should utilize 
lacking facilities from FreeBSD host system - but obviously it doesn't, 
especially if there are non-existent users. As I realized - and this 
puzzles me - there was no passwd file in my configuration, so I guess 
the Linuxulator has to contact the underlying FreeBSD infrastructure to 
get UIDs like root and others - but this seems not to be the case.

Regards,
Oliver