When I add acroread (version3.02) to the applications in netscape for reading pdf files acroread dumps core after the download of the pdf file. When reading the pdf file outside netscape everything is fine. The problem occurs with all versionsof netscape 4.07, 4.08 and 4.5. It did not occur with previous versions of netscape/redhat releases I know of.(rh4.2, rh5.1).
you're launching libc5 acroread from glibc2 netscape. There's probably library confusion somewhere. Look at the acroread binary; IIRC, it's a shell script. I believe there's a line in it that sets "LD_LIBRARY_PATH"; add "/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib" to the beginning of that path. Does that help?
I had this problem too. It turned out that /usr/bin/netscape sets LD_PRELOAD environment variable to be /lib/libBrokenLocale.so.1, acroread inherits it, tries to preload this library and crashes because of that. My workaround was to write a small shell script: #!/bin/sh unset LD_PRELOAD exec /usr/local/Acrobat3/bin/acroread $* and to specify that script in Preferences|Navigator|Applications
This workaround solves the problem indeed! Thanks.
Why was this bug discarded? The problem still exists and it is caused by the /usr/bin/netscape script written by RedHat. The only application known to suffer from this is Acroread, but probably some other application would also crash because of this unexpected LD_PRELOAD.
I already found a new one suffering from this: the citrix (www.citrix.com) icaclient (wfica) for running windows applications on a remote NT machine. I need this client to access databases in our library. Making a similar script unsetting LD_PRELOAD fixes it again, however this is an unsatisfactory situation. It should be fixed in the netscape script.
The LD_PRELOAD in netscape was needed in previous versions to fix a locale problem with netscape. It's no longer necessary in recent versions of netscape. Fixed in 4.08-5.