Slashdot Mirror
DeXtop And Free Software
Rikul writes "Great article over at linuxplanet.com about Xi Graphics trying to remarket CDE under a different name, DeXtop. Aside from fact that DeXtop wouldn't work without Xi's X server, it also breaks many libraries that Gnome/KDE/e depend on. " The piece is definitely op-ed, but raises some interesting points.
When I was at Berkeley, the CS department had several badly overcrowded labs full of HP-UX boxes (712/66, or something, I think), and the policy was that if someone left a workstation unattended for more than 15 minutes, you could log him out and take it. A friend once told me that he had made the mistake of doing this to the wrong guy: the guy came back a bit later, which led to the following conversation:
Guy: "Hey, what are you doing on my workstation?"
My friend: "I logged you out; you were gone for half an hour, so the policy says it's mine."
Guy: I see. [walks away]
A few minutes later, bad things started happening to my friend's session, as in, it stopped responding and eventually died. The guy must have gone to some other machine and done something evil to this one. Our best guess was that he had fired off about a dozen compiles (it only took three or four to bring those things to their knees at the best of times), or maybe a forkbomb (I tried that once, and it didn't handle it any better than the last Linux box I tried it on). I now suspect that he must have done something like what you describe (cat a binary to his
I guess it was one of those "Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger and have no need of subtlety" things. The lesson was that those labs can be a dangerous place, since you never know who's capable of what. As long as you figure that the average person in there knows more than you do, you want to step carefully.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
> Try dragging a Netscape icon from the file manager into one of the sub-panels.
:)
Try dragging the netscape bookmark widget (the one to the left of the Location bar) to a folder. Crash. Actually I like those drawers in the panel (especially the "install icon" drop target), I just wish they would make the damn thing a little narrower and have it dock to the bottom of the screen. Then again it's kind of moot now since I don't use CDE anymore, and it would seem that very soon, neither will Sun
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
- I thought the free KDE and GNOME would have finished off CDE long ago
They have effectively done it for the Linux community. Not too long ago, I remember that Red Hat was selling its highest priced boxed distribution with a port of CDE and MetroX. However, if you buy any expensive Unix set, even still, it comes with CDE. The shipping version of Solaris comes with CDE and OpenView, although that will change according to Sun.What is ultimatly being said to the Linux community is "Here, you want to be like the bug ugly Unix systems you've managed to defeat? Buy this, and pray it works." ... What their marketing department doesn't understand is that we're using Linux for some damn good reasons, and that if we wanted CDE, we would have embraced it long ago. If I wanted CDE, I'd go get Solaris for Intel.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
This is usually the beginnings of the end. The last Unix company I remember that seriously marketed the "But, with Linux, it's all run by a bunch of grubby hackers - you don't want to trust your business to that, do you?" was SCO...and they didn't last very long after that.
Let's face it - providing for lots of money exactly what others provide for free isn't a very good business model.
The author of the article probably didn't try to make it look better. The default KDE and GNOME setup, last I knew, also looks ugly. Motif is easier to theme for because it inherits X widget properties. A crude X theme could simply be made by adding to .Xdefaults the lines:
**foreground: White
*background: #9B009B00B900
Also the author didn't mention any disadvantages of GNOME and KDE. Last I used GNOME, it was extremely slow starting compared with CDE, because of unnecessary programs that it tries to start. These caplets only functioned well when started by gnome and poorly in shell scripts. It was difficult to get GNOME to not start them because it would overwrite my gnome config files. Also, some of what the caplets do could be better handled by preexisting programs. For example, the mouse properties caplet could be handled by xset. This leads me to think that GNOME is not very modular.
I have my Matrox driver working now. The new Matrox drivers work very well. (I even have the agpgart code working in the 2.2.x kernels.)
My frustration with XiG needs to be clarified though.
They charge too much for a product that I can get elsewhere for free or near free. (All I really needed was dual monitor support anyways. The rest worked fine right out of the box.)
They are nasty and churlish in reguards to other members of the Open Source community who compete with them.
Both good reasons to have nothing to do with them.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
What scares me is that some hardware is now shipping with a disclaimer stating that if you use your hardare on an OS other than Windows or MacOS, you could void your warranty.
LOL, how are they going to tell what OS you are using? "Hmmm, I smell herring on this sound card... it's that damn penguin! No refund for that Linux user."
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
You shouldn't take Xi's statements so seriously. They are only targeting business users who already run other systems using CDE, and would like to run a Linux box with the same interface, and want to have a company to gripe at if something goes wrong.
All ads use exaggeration in lauding the company's products. You have to take it with a grain of salt. When they say "Only one X server for Linux offers quality, performance and stability" it really means "our X server is stable and high-performance, and we take support calls." It is not really commenting on other X-servers.
It's like when Exxon advertises that they "put a tiger in your tank." So do all the other gasolines. They're just trying to create a positive mental image of their own product, and they can't sound blase about it or you wouldn't buy it.
The popularity of Linux proves that free GUIs are here to stay, too.
I got so tired of seeing their spam, I swore NEVER to even consider buying their stuff.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Now, my main user box is an SGI Indigo 2, and I use KDE on my Linux systems. CDE? Why bother?
Anyone want a nice HP cheap?
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I think "great" might be overrating it a bit. The author bought a piece of barely supported (by XFree86) hardware and then bought AX. If you want to experience a similar effect, try this:
1) Buy ATI VGAWonder(Circa 1989 or so).
2) Be amazed at how slow XFree runs
3) Buy a Matrox G400.
4) Be amazed at how fast XFree runs
5) Write an article lauding XFree
Short version: Buying poorly supported hardware will color your impressions of software. Most tests show XFree to be pretty equivelent to AX on modern graphics cards...
"Also, keep in mind that applications written to "target" a freeware GUI such as Gnome, KDT, Enlightenment, or one of the others floating around out there, likely will not work with the industry standard CDE, on which DeXtop is based."
So basically, they tell you that all the up to date, brand spanking new, award winning (ok...and mozzila too...) free software on available for linux won't work when you use their product?
Sounds like a shoe in for Best Acid Trip at LWCE 2000, with great potential for a repeat award. I wonder if the marketing guys at their boot knew why everyone was pointing and laughing at them.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
My usual reaction to thoughts of buying Accelerated X is to suggest, as a thought, that the gentle reader consider:
The one situation where Xi's products really might commend themselves are where you want to use a really high end 3D graphics card in conjunction with a heavily tuned OpenGL implementation.
The other arguable situation where one might need Xi is when you get yourself into the unfortunate condition of having bought a laptop for which XFree86 does not support the video chipset.
Although I think I'd rather do business with MetroLink, personally...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
CDE is actually fairly nice technology, and if you don't like the look you can customise it through X resources.
Yeah, if we could just get C# working on linux, we can get rid of libc!!
Sheesh dude. ALL of our kde & gnome software is based on Xlib calls. DEAR GOD MAN. Unless all the underlying abstractions are INSANELY similar, rewriting those libs for displayPDF will be truly painful.
Besides, I LIKE X. It's pretty good at what it does, honestly. Of course, I liked Motif and CDE, but that's just me. I was one of the few who paid for a GUI back in the day (RedHat 4, slackware, back when fvwm95 was the big thing) and it ran fine for me. I might still run it if my copy wasn't all libc5 :-)
But, there are things to be learned from CDE. It was designed to be very managable from central administration. It really did use the power of X; at least in design.. the implementation had some real problems. But that's politics of the era which makes sense.
Oh, and Motif programming isn't really that bad!! Sheesh, I still code GUIs in motif. Sorry, but I haven't found equal documentation for either QT or GTK.
Please people, let's give the Open Group A LITTLE BIT OF CREDIT. They're not another microsoft. They are just people from all the big UNIX vendors trying to get something made through all the chaos.. they didn't have the unified Linux platform (it's pretty damn unified in contrast folks... distro wars aren't really that bad) that we have now. And they didn't work for the home user first; these were industrial strength professional systems; "prettyness" wasn't too high on the agenda. Motif is damn usable. Complain all you want about dtwm, but it was pretty damn good for its time.
CDE even included hyperlinked multimedia (this means text+graphics) help before HTML really took off.
In essence, CDE shouldn't be hated or forgotten, but be made a great case study; it has a few features (like ease of administration) which could be made better in gnome & kde. Anyways, lemme get off my soapbox.
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
From the headline page for Dextop (click here):
...So, I pay you money for a version of a crappy(*) old *IX desktop that's been opened up anyway, and in return I'll get documentation that doesn't reflect what "value" you've "added"..
And not only that but you're admitting that you haven't updated that documentation through either incompetence or laziness or both. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I'm happy that I'm not going to have any support issues here then...
Really compelling sales-case they're making here, aren't they?
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
It does note, quite correctly, that having proprietary software ported to Linux really goes against the goals of the Free Software community. On the other hand, it misses completely the fact that many of the big proprietary UNIX vendors are switching from CDE to GNOME anyway.
And more importantly, it also misses the fact that it might just be possible to create apps that can work almost seamlessly within at least two GUIs if the authors of those GUIs can come up with effective ways to combine them. Which, IIRC, the KDE and GNOME folks seem to be doing underneath the sniping. :)
I'm mostly just boggled that Xi is missing the strong momentum away from CDE, whatever it's going towards.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Lord, will someone please educate Xi graphics on how to make money? The X server product is riddled with problems ranging from hardware support down to simple tech support & price. Lord - who's going to pay 100 bucks for an X server at home? The world of UNIX has opened up to a lot more than just corporations who have money - it has opened up to the individual. How many individuals do you see using CDE at home? How many could you invision using KDE or GNOME? I really hope that the answer becomes apparent. The UNIX marketplace has evolved and Xi has been left in the dust - much because of themselves.
The install program needs to be a little more direct in what it's doing. Other than that, their products are very good, speedwise and stability-wise. I've never had an issue with their software - just the installer.
There's a review from a while back here.
- "(...)it is of concern to us at Xi Graphics that the proliferation of GUIs for Linux is leading the operating system down the same path we took UNUX down back in the '70s and early '80s."
- "Let's go with ONE GUI for Linux."
- "Anarchy and chaos may be fun, but not here."
- "(...)applications written to 'target' a freeware GUI such as Gnome, KDT, Enlightenment, or one of the others floating around out there, likely will not work with the industry standard CDE(...)" (huh, KDT?)
How do they seriously think they'll be accepted as the one true Linux GUI when they pay hundreds on hundreds of idealistic free software developers such major disrespect? I had no idea any serious company could operate in such ways, and live.--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I looked into their products when I was looking for a driver for my Matrox G400 Max card a number of months ago. They had one, but their marketing spiel was so NEGATIVE that I refused to buy anything from them. (Not to mention that they wanted about $200 for a driver to run my card and it appeared like I would have to spend alot more to get everything I use running.)
Their web site touts their implementation of OpenGL, not by giving you reasons as to why to buy it, but by slamming the Mesa people over and over. (As well as blaming the Mesa people for XiG's bad choices in naming of their libraries for OpenGL.) Seriously nasty and distateful stuff.
Judging by the other things I have heard out of their marketing department, I don't want anything to do with them. (Especially if they break Gnome and KDE libraries to make CDE code work. How much of a default Redhat install with work after you do that? Not much I would guess.)
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
I think you're not reading in threaded mode or something...I was responding to a post pointing to a review of Accelerated X, also made by Xi Graphics...