Over at opensolaris.org whenever someone mentions "why is there no Adobe Reader for Solaris x86", we always end up with a mailstorm and a drawn out discussion.


I see only one way to end those discussions and that is being able to download an Acrobat Reader for Solaris/x86.


While "it should be a simple recompile" may not always be completely true, your coworkers on the flashplayer side of the house appear to manage just fine. Perhaps you guys borrow an account there?


Or are you just kicking off this blog to prepare us for the iminent release of Adobe Reader 8 for UNIX? That would be good news indeed too.

Are there any plans on porting Adobe Reader to Solaris/x86. Currently it's only available on Solaris/Sparc, but in the last 18months there has been significant traction when it comes to people using Solaris on x86 systems.

-Paul

Glad to hear that there is active development in this area. Please feel free to contact me if you need someone to do beta testing.

(I primarily use Solaris x86, but can also test on Sparc.)

I don't know if this means distiller is getting resurrected? (We are using Apago tools for distilling, since Adobe abdicated this role). The Apago tools are pretty good BTW.

P.S. - If you could put in a good word for Solaris x86 to the CS2 folks, I'd very much appreciate it!!

Great news! I look forward to having Acroread available on UNIX systems at some point in the future. Is there anything we can do to help make this happen?

I would like to see the reader on Solaris/x86

The one fantastic combination that Adobe has missed in their product portfolio.

As you can see there is a strong groundswell of support for having Acrobat on Solaris x86.

Go ahead, make our day! :-)

Thanks

It would be great to see Adobe expand their reader/unix offerings.

Can I add a +1 to the support of Solaris X86?

Thanks

Does this mean Adobe will finally answer our prayers about Acrobat Reader for Solaris on i86pc?

Can you give an indication of your target "UNIX" operating systems and hardware platforms please. Solaris on both SPARC and x86 is my main interest. I find I have to use Evince on Solaris due to the lack of Adobe Reader. I also use Preview on MacOS X because the Adobe Reader is slower.

Excellent! I would love to replace my aging acroread v4 on Solaris x86 with something more recent...

Wonderful. This would be a very welcome addition to Solaris X86.

I WANT *ALL* ADOBE PRODUCTS ON SOLARIS x86. YES. I AM SHOUTING, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT BEEN LISTENING TO US.

Are you guys living in the stone age or what ? OpenSolaris looks all set to kick out Linux from the Desktop and you guys don't have your premier product - Acrobat Reader, running on it ?

Launching Adobe reader for Unix is great news! Thanx for making this happen. Can you please make it clear which Unix version you are targeting? I'm more interested in Solaris x86

Yes, Solaris x86 please. On the one hand, it's a tribute to Acrobat Reader 4.0 that it's held up so well -- I continue to use it as my primary PDF reader, and it's quick and robust. (I confess, that I often use poor hapless acroread as fodder for my DTrace presentations, but that's nothing against acroread.) I would really like to be able to run (and DTrace?) a more recent version, so a version for Solaris x86 would be grand!

Does this mean Adobe will finally give its UNIX customers what they want?

A Solaris/x86 version of AcroRead is high on our list.

Great news! The latest Flash updates have been very helpful and now acroread...thanks.

When you say UNIX I gather this means Solaris on both x86/64 and Sparc?

Now with Solaris being open sourced, many developers have started using it and working on it. Also, Sun has put more stress into the Solaris Desktop (aka x86 version of Solaris) and there are many projects being worked out. So, many Linux users will start using Solaris soon. So as the number of users goes up exponentially, the Adobe will see business justification for compiling the x86 version of Acrobat Reader for Solaris.

But, how do we make Adobe aware that, userbase of Solaris_x86 is increasing exponentially? Do we have any business contact inside Adode, whom we can influence!?

Acrobat for Solaris x86 would be great! Solaris x86 has been downloaded from Sun's site more than 7 million times. Each copy I downloaded, I have installed to several computers at home and my friends have borrowed my Solaris x86 copy twice. And there are also all SPARC Solaris users. Solaris 10 is gaining momentum, and Adobe would have many more customers in a blink.

My wish list for Adobe Reader for Unix is simply to support a command-line interface (CLI) for printing PDFs.

We are Unix people. We don't want to point and click. We expect a command line interface.

Re: Support for Solaris/x86

Thank you all for the overwhelming response. First, let me clarify that Unix here includes not just Solaris, but also the Linux Desktop. Adobe Reader on Unix is available on Linux, Solaris sparc, AIX and HP-UX variants of Unix. It's evident that there's increasing user base on Solaris/x86 and we (the engineering team) are having discussions with product management about the feasibility of this support in future releases.

Re: CLI for Printing PDFs

Have you tried using the -toPostScript command line option? You can use this option to generate a PS file and send that to the printer by simply piping the output, without the need to launch the Acroread UI. Type acroread -help for detailed help on the various command line options.

First of all, thanks a lot for making flashplayer 9 available on opensolaris.

Given that the latest version of the Acrobat Reader is readily available on Linux, is there really a technical reason that makes porting to Solaris/x86 difficult ?

Please make Acrobat Reader available on Solaris x86 ! You shall have the goodwill of the entire opensolaris community :-)

At the risk of becoming repetitive, I'll add my voice to those requesting Solaris on x86 support.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Reader on Solaris x86 Please Please Please!! I predict a server crash from all the downloads on the initial day of the beta release of Acrobat on Solaris x86!

Could you make Adobe Reader available for Solaris 10 X86 please.
I don't understand why, now Sun Solaris x86 users are increasing (and HP-UX, AIX decreasing on a desktop standpoint) why I have Adobe reader 7.09 for Sparc, HP-UX and AIX and nothing for Solaris x86.
On the desktop Solaris 10 x86 user base is now larger than AIX or HP-UX one and Sun support commitment for x86 is strong and no longer ambigous (as it was before Solaris 9 x86) and goes beyond Sun Stations.

A DELL+Solaris 10 x86 user.

yes, thanks for flash 9 on solaris x86. We are impatient about acrobat reader on solaris x86 too

Nice product for Unix, nearly perfect.
Just one thing and it's complete : A Solaris 10 X86 version. Thanks

I'll be waiting, and wish you success in in this important project.

See http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/pdf-a-portable-persnickety-problematic-and-proprietary-document-format/

thanks,
dave

+1 for AcrobatReader 8.1.1 on Solaris x86. Please.

HI,

First thanks for the Sparc acroreader.

But we are migrating from Sparc to AMD Solaris now and Acroread is one very critical tool for Engineering when reading Datasheets and manuals.

Also we are using Framemaker in Sparc and would also like to have it ported to AMD Solaris but this might be the wrong forum but maybe you could pass it on or show me where to request that port.

cheers

Michael Laajanen

Thanks for setting up this blog.

+1 for Acroread on Solaris/x86, as much as I like Gnome, Acroread is a hell of a lot more desirable than gPDF.

Like many of us, Acroread will let me move move my desktops at both home and work to Solaris x86. I've got screaming fast Solaris x86 boxes, but no Acroread to match...

I am posting this from Solaris x86, and using an ancient versio nof Acrobat Reader 4.0 dated Jan. 24, 2000. I would like to have a more up-to-date version of Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86

Acrobat Reader 8 for Solaris x86! This would be a great thing!

We install hundreds of Solaris 10 desktops via Sun Ray thin clients. Office apps are covered with OpenOffice, browsing with Firefox, mail with Thunderbird, operations with SteelClaws but... PDF support is hit-and-miss at best.

If only there was Acroread for Solaris x86...

Now that even Dell is supporting Solaris on it's x86 server surely it's time to provide a new Adobe Reader version for Solaris/x86... PLEASE!

We have a lot of Sun workstations with Solaris10/x86. We really hope we can have Acroread for Solaris10 x86.

We too are migrating our Engineering environment from Sparc to AMD x86. Not only ami I needing Acroread for Solarix 10/x86, I'm interested in Framemaker for our desktop publishing needs.

Acroread is a much needed and overdue application for Solaris 10 x86. The Solaris user base is quite large, but often hard to measure. Thanks for the blog.

We have a need for Acroread on Solaris 10 x86. Are there any plans for this?

Here's another vote for x86 Solaris support.

Here's another vote for x86 Solaris support

Well it's almost the 1st of April here (1.5 hours to go). Lets not joke about, +1 to Solaris x86 support. The community will flood you with eager beta-testers, who want your product to function well on our favourite platform.

I believe the community would be more than happy to make it 32-bit Solaris 10 and later (after all S10 was released in March 2005), so you have less test vectors.

Please make us all very happy this quarter and at least start beta-testing!

Peter

Sydney, Australia

Well, I finally switched to OpenSolaris on my notebook after a one year testphase. I'm currently on Nevada b85 and there are only a few items on the to-do and nice-to-have list left. Well, one relly important app that's missing is Acrobat Reader for (Open)Solaris x86.

Hope we'll soon be happy

-best
Frank

Please release Adobe Reader for Solaris x86- It's the one application I want Adobe to release for Solaris (other than Flash!!)

Yes. Adobe Acrobat Reader on x86 would be great! Please port/recompile it for x86 machines. Why wouldn't you? Is someone twisting Adobe's arm?

Solaris x86 would be a great way to run FrameMaker on the Mac (under VMware) without having to run Windows... if only FrameMaker and Acrobat ran on Solaris/x86...

PLEASE please... Solaris x86 versions of Reader would be SO useful, I develop on and use daily Solaris x86 and having to fall back on a crippled, buggy Evince is not working for me, do I really have to set up a Linux virtual machine to use the defacto standard documentation reader...

Please release a Solaris x86 version.

Since Framemaker 8 is available for Solaris SPARC, can you please recompile it for Solaris x86? It shouldn't involve more than re-running the compiler.