OpenSolaris Governing Board, Acrobatics

The results are in; the OpenSolaris community has a new Governing Board. However, the proposed new constitution failed to gain sufficient support for approval.

Have to say I was slightly surprised (and, to be honest, a little disappointed) to see that only two non-Sun folks were voted in this time around (especially as one of those is a former Sun folk), but I have no doubt they’ll do a fine job… starting, I expect, by revisiting that constitution issue.

In other news, the long hiatus between releases of Adobe Reader for [Open]Solaris x86 is over… grab Reader 9.1 now on Adobe’s download page. Very fine though Evince is at handling the majority of PDF-reading tasks, some jobs still just require the proprietary Real Thing…and however one might feel about that, it’s great that Solaris and OpenSolaris are now sufficiently (re-)established on x86 that Adobe are offering that option once again.

4 thoughts on “OpenSolaris Governing Board, Acrobatics”

  1. > Very fine though Evince is at handling the majority of PDF-reading
    > tasks, some jobs still just require the proprietary Real Thing…

    and bug numbers at b.g.o are? I am a big fan of elimination of Adobe goo from Linux distros, and I haven’t met for a long time PDF which wouldn’t be processed with Evince correctly (sans Javascript in Reader, which I am really happy that Evince cannot do; apparently Adobe themselves are not eager to fix exploited bug in it).

  2. @Matěj: I’m not really talking about rendering bugs, just missing features.

    E.g. right now I’m collaborating on a PDF document where we’re making heavy use of comments and annotations, but Evince doesn’t let me read existing comments, or add new comments or annotations. So I can’t use Evince for this, I have to use Adobe Reader, or something like Preview on OS X. (Bug numbers: 515243, 568052.)

    Last I heard, Reader still had better accessibility support than Evince too, although I haven’t looked into that for a while.

    I know there are people working hard on all these things for Evince, but in the meantime, from a business perspective, Adobe Reader is still a necessary evil, IMHO—bottom line is, Sun will sell support for more Solaris desktops because Adobe Reader is available natively. (And you might be surprised how many support contracts Red Hat would lose if there was no Linux version!)

  3. Sure, I am not arguing against that (we have it in RHEL as well), just wanted to make sure we are on the same page, which apparently we are.

  4. … respecitvely, my point was that Adobe Acrobat Reader should be used only sparringly and when necessary (yes, comments are problem).

    Otherwise, in situations when evince is sufficient (which is 100% cases for me, and apparently a little less for you), evince tends to work much better (simple menu, fitting into Gnome better, uncluttered interface, etc.)

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