Adobe dipping toes into desktop Linux waters (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports that Adobe is beginning to wake up to Linux. "The San Jose, Calif., company confirmed its OSDL membership but wouldn't comment on most of its Linux desktop software plans. However, Pam Deziel, an Adobe director of product marketing, did say the company doesn't think there are enough customers today to justify selling Linux versions of its flagship Photoshop or Illustrator graphics programs."

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Bah!

Posted Nov 3, 2004 13:39 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Adobe was supposedly going to port FrameMaker to Linux (which would have basically been a recompile -- it already ran on Solaris) but chickened out.

Adobe is just another proprietary vendor that's scared of Microsoft.

FrameMaker on Linux

Posted Nov 3, 2004 13:53 UTC (Wed) by mtk77 (subscriber, #6040) [Link]

It's worse: there was freely downloadable beta, and it basically worked fine. It was time-bombed, though.

I really liked it, too.

FrameMaker on Linux

Posted Nov 3, 2004 19:47 UTC (Wed) by jeskritt (subscriber, #4092) [Link]

I used the beta for about a year. They had 2 or 3 releases during that time. So it wasn't a straight recompile of the Solaris code, they actually devoted developer time to making it work well on linux. The final betas worked better than the current Mac OS X version of Framemaker.

Bah!

Posted Nov 3, 2004 19:00 UTC (Wed) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

We used FrameMaker under OpenWindows (on Sun/3 workstations, running SunOS/4.x) back in 1989, at Cadence Design Systems' techpubs department -- it was an excellent performer, and would be *stellar* on Linux boxen.

Bah!

Posted Nov 3, 2004 19:10 UTC (Wed) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" Adobe is just another proprietary vendor that's scared of Microsoft. "

Imagine Microsoft incorporating into their Office package a *good enough* Image Manipulating program like Photoshop, and make MS Office able to edit PDF also,... and all deeply integrated in a MS way, with planned torpedos for the competition... that just could terminate Adobe!

In the end is not only fear but a enourmous dose of *ansiety*... Adobe knows MS cant be trusted... Open Source is growing fast... yet Windows will still dominate the Desktop, for the next years.

Acroread 6 would be nice

Posted Nov 3, 2004 16:12 UTC (Wed) by epithumia (subscriber, #23370) [Link]

If they're going to start somewhere, it would be nice if they started with Acrobat Reader 6. With no free alternative that will do PDF forms and Acroread 5 being a rather poor piece of software, we're in a tough spot. They've shown they can deal with QT at least, so there's some hope of them using something other than Motif.

Acroread 6 would be nice

Posted Nov 3, 2004 18:43 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

... and if not, well, there's always LessTif for the "let's do a quick recompile and basically change nothing" crowd.

Speaking of quick recompiles: libwine is licensed under the LGPL. Adobe would probably have to do something WRT color management, where Linux still has a few rough edges, but it's not as if Windows or MacOS was a stellar example of how to map color spaces when they started out there.

Acroread 6 would be nice

Posted Nov 3, 2004 23:43 UTC (Wed) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

There is a free alternative, xpdf. In some instances, it works better than Acrobat (not always, but sometimes).

Plus you can do pdf2ps <filename> - | gv -

kghostview also allows you to view pdf files (it uses gs just like pdf2ps above).

Acrobat will lock out printing sometimes, but any of the above options is a work around for those. xpdf will even display encrypted files if you have the password.

Acroread 6 would be nice

Posted Nov 4, 2004 6:35 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

Or just plain gv; I've rarely had a problem with that.