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Sun Announces It Will Ship Solaris With Eazel
miester writes: "Sun has recently announced that it will take advantage of Eazel's Nautilus software. The article also mentions that Dell has invested in Eazel and will be shipping all Dell Linux workstations with Nautilus as well." The Nautilus previews have been slick and pretty -- you can tell that the Mac folks involved haven't lost their touch. And more hardware vendors installing a nice Open Source file manager can only be good for users.
why the hell is this post score 0! Thank you very much.. MOD THIS UP!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Then you obviously didn't buy them from sun.com, where, and I just checked this, they do change $75US plus shipping.
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Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
Installation is not a good measure of ease of use, it is just a significant (perhaps insurmoutable) hurdle that Linux has that Windows does not. If Linux came pre-installed on machines you can bet that "difficulty of installation" would be WAY down the list of problems, like it is for Windows.
What's with the requirements:
x86 compatible processor (200 mHz minimum)
Can you compile the source on PPC linux? Is there a deliberate lack of strategy here? Hmm, Mac like interface at the exact moment when PPC linux becomes mature and Apple starts insulting their own userbase. More and more geeks are saying "man, my overpriced Mac really flys when I put a half decent OS on it" whether they are installing PPC linux or installing OS X PB, is really up to us.
On a completely unrelated note, I wonder if I can port this thing to win32. I could put shell=gnome in my windoze ini's and I wouldn't have to see megabytes of memory wasted on integrated dll's (no, I'd have to see it filled up with mozilla libs).
So if you talk about strategy, would it be a viable plan to port a superior GUI to win32 + MacOS and get users loving it? Assumably, after using a better GUI on a crappy kernel (for win32 at least) users would start to wish for stability and speed that can only be provided by a real OS.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Why is a file manager with huge shaded icons, that use up loads of colors and make it harder to see the filename, better?
When the web first got going properly there were loads of horrific web sites featuring uber-graphic-design that made it really difficult to actually get at the information. Most of them died a death - nowdays we have things that are a lot cleaner, simpler and easier to use (like slashdot).
As technology becomes a familiar tool - rather than an exciting new thing to play with as well as use, it gets more and more boring. As it should - fading into the background to just do its job, rather than existing up front, to be looked at and impressed by.
I suspect, that, just as people turn off all the anoying sounds associated with a window manager, until there's just a beep for errors (usually), people using a filemanager such as Nautilus, or KFM, will shrink the icons and make them less 'attractive' until they have a minimal, functional tool that doesn't take up more real estate or perceptual space than it needs to.
Actually - this is probably wrong. Most users will just say 'I don't like it, it doesn't feel right', and turn to something else...
For one thing, it is (of course) theme-able, so if you don't like the green, change it. Already an improvement over MS-explorer. And then, the file icons aren't just improved, there's also varying levels of detail about each file based on how far you "zoom" in or out. So, you can go from just the plane-jane name up to "this file has X items and was last modified at 4:30." I'm not sure, but I'm hoping this level of detail is configurable and maybe you can even get full details in a floating tooltip or something.
Granted, this isn't exactly revolutionizing the way you interact with your computer, but it is some slick stuff and I dare say better than what we've currently got. Speaking of which:
Most people don't use this mode, though, because the typical browser is a bad interface choice for system & file operations.Okay, now I must be missing something: if most people don't use this mode, what DO they use? Almost everyone I know (all the windows users anyway) uses an interface exactly like this to navigate their filesystems. Why? If nothing else, then because it's the default setup on win98 and ME. Unless you're talking about something totally different, then this Eazel interface should be super intuitive to windows users, as well as having some added benefits like the ones I mentioned above.
The Nautilus previews have been slick and pretty -- you can tell that the Mac folks involved haven't lost their touch.
I must be missing something, because all I see in the screenshots are pictures of a green-themed Internet Explorer with improved file icons being used to navigate the directory structure.
This has been available on PCs since Win95.
Most people don't use this mode, though, because the typical browser is a bad interface choice for system & file operations.
I'm guessing that the Nautilus team is composed solely of ex-Apple graphic designers and doesn't include any user-interface experts.
Maybe I'm just being cranky, but these screenshots are singularly uninspiring. I dare say if the MS folks announced this as the foundation of their next-gen GUI, they'd be laughed off the stage.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
A GUI is more than a file manager it's more than a desktop. It's a way work can be done. It's more than drag n drop. It's more than scripting. It's more than application communication services. Look at Windows. Each feature by itself is not problemmatic. How they interact with each other is the problem. I have a Windows. I'm write this on it. It's internet service is provide via PPP shared by natd on MacOS X PB. I can tell you this. MacOS X may not have an Apple menu (which most users don't ever use anyways), or an Application menu, but all the elements of a good GUI are there. Everything flows. I have yet to see a SINGLE error message. It's been on for 65 days. Daily use. Everything behaves EXACTLY like it did in MacOS 9 (with the exception that in the PB Bluebox isn't so transparent with copy/paste drag/drop). From what I've seen of what Eazel is doing, it's better than Gnome, but it isn't a MacOS yet. Mac users aren't going to switch to Linux when MacOS X PB is more usefull than RedHat7 and still much easier to use than Windows, and most likely Nautilus 1.0.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Thanks to the GNOME foundation, I think that it's fair to say that GNOME is approaching "critical mass" on the *u*x* desktop front. I myself use and prefer to use KDE2, but GNOME looks like it will just have the numbers.
If this is the case, we can expect to see a steady marginalisation, RedHat-style, of non-GNOME desktop systems. Eventually GNOME will be the target platform for commercial systems relying on object frameworks (bonobo, named for promiscuous monkeys) versus KDE (KParts/DCOP).
KDE's ace-in-the-hole is Kylix, which may yet keep it breathing in the face of a growing GNOME juggernaut. I still think that it is a tragic shame that neither Red Hat or VA Linux bought up TrollTech and GPL'd Qt when they had the cash to do so. It would have resolved the license issue much sooner.
We'll see.
--
"Don't declare a revolution unless you are prepared to be guillotined." - Anon.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
I find it very interesting how seriously Dell appears to be taking the Linux crowd as of late. I think that slower sales are part of the motivation, but also the thought of having to deal with the likes of IBM taking away some of their market share is also a concern. At any rate, whether it is purely by choice or by shove, I am glad to see a good hardware vendor move on over to help out the Linux community.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Well, a few things come to mind. The first one is that the Eazel folks are trying to design in the idea of expertise in the interface. So most of the screenshots I've seen, some of which are really silly, are from the novice view. I haven't seen much of the so-called Intermediate and Advanced views, but I suspect that they use available screen real estate much differently.
It's also clear that Eazel is way easier to customize than current desktoppy environments; I've never seen a screen shot that didn't let you view as things other than icons.
They're also claiming, and this will be the interesting part, that they can also give you easy access to content and attribute-based views of your file system. OK, so I've got 166 pdf files, 496 postscript files, and 75 other EPS files in my personal account alone. The problem is, of course, that they're scattered all over the directory hierarchy, and it can be tricky to find (or remember) exactly where any one document is. It would be great to have a view of my files that would bring together all the "postscripty" files, or just the non-graphical postscripty files, or all postscripty files that belong with research projects, or what have you. Now, you can do that with a standard unix file system through clever, deliberate, and pre-planned thinking about your directory structure (and maybe the use of symbolic links), but almost nobody does this. And, if they do, they then find the nth plus one way they *really* want to look at stuff, but which is difficult with their pre-calculated layout and the available tools.
And there really are situations where a standard hierarchical view of my files just gets in the way. Now that most of us have thousands of little twisty files hanging around, there has to be an answer somewhere. One idea is to change our filesystems to something more flexible (based perhaps on a relational model). Another idea, which I take to be similar to Eazel's, is to layer (and in some cases, infer) an additional attribute database over the file system so that you can see what you've got in the way most relevant to you at the moment. Now, it's possible that they forgot to make this part sufficiently scriptable for the common geek, but I severely doubt it.
So I'm not sure whether Eazel's stuff will be the bee's knees, but I'm encouraged that they've figured out that different views for different purposes and users is the key concept to implement, rather than (merely) nicer looking icons or pin-striped menubars.
Babar
Does anyone think that Nautilus might be taking away from the MacOS crowd when it goes mainstream (eventually)? After all, you have a pretty nice GUI, plus Apple is really confusing people w/ the interface for OS X to the point that even the beta testers are modifying it. Perhaps Mac is putting itself into a very uncomfortable place. (What, like the backseat of a Volkswagon?)
-Mr. Fusion
I quite agree. Whatever happened to the Bauhaus principle of 'form follows function?'.
I think this point is really important, it disturbes me the way things are going.
Surely, the point of a GUI front ent to an OS is:
i) to give you the relevant information quickly, efficiently and as unobtrusively as possible.
ii) to let you navigate the data and apps to get the job done as easily as you can.
This sounds to me exactly the same demands placed on the signs we take for granted in metros and streets. Taking Harry Beck's fantastic, London Underground map as an example, it takes the complex tangled mess of underground lines and represents it with a clean and simple diagram. Sans serif fonts, no complex shading, straight lines and a complete lack of unnecessary clutter.
The same is true for road signs and the direction signs around public spaces. No beautifully shaded pictures of toilets or telephones, just a few distilled strokes that are enough to clearly represent the concept. I dread to think how many more people would die in fires if these simple design principles weren't stuck to by the graphic designers responsible for 'Fire-Exit' signs...
"Since Win95" is a bad choice of words...the default IE installed by the earlier releases of Win95 was absolutely depressingly pitiful, and didn't have all the all-in-one features you're talking about. That didn't really happen till IE 4.0.
Ahh, those wonderful days when it was actually better to use Netscape instead of IE...
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Main Entry: easel
:-)
Pronunciation: 'E-z&l
Function: noun
Etymology: Dutch ezel, literally, ass, from Middle Dutch esel; akin to Old English esol ass; both from a prehistoric East Germanic-West Germanic word borrowed from Latin asinus ass
Date: 1596
: a frame for supporting something (as an artist's canvas)
It's good to know it's not just a play on "easy", don't you think
I use SPARC/Solaris as my primary development setup. While I prefer the setup in Linux, thye development tools are still much better under Solaris (though Linux is gaining ground); for example, dbx under Solaris runs circles around gdb. There are also some commercial/legacy things that come with it that aren't as simple to set up under an open source environment (e.g., Display Postscript, Motif, etc.). Lots of the APIs and the like are also better documented (see the Linker and Libraries guide). New Java VMs are also released more quickly. And, best of all, it is close enough to Linux, etc. that porting is trivial.
Unfortunately, Sun has really flubbed the default interface. There is an odd melange of CDE-style tools and ugly Openlook stuff that makes lots of assuptions about how you have your window manager set up and whose mouse controls and menus work differently than every other UI package in the world. To make it usable, you have to strip it of all that stuff and build the various programs that your typical Linux distro sets up (fvwm2, etc.) If Sun has come to its senses and has realized that rather than making embarassing attempts at UI, it should just outsource the job to someone who cares, the difference will become even more transparent.
For one thing, it is (of course) theme-able, so if you don't like the green, change it. Already an improvement over MS-explorer.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry, no dice. There are a bunch of themers for Windows.
And then, the file icons aren't just improved,
there's also varying levels of detail about each file based on how far you "zoom" in or out. So, you can go from just the plane-jane name up to "this file has X items and was last
modified at 4:30."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Tracker, Explorer, and just about every file manager ever written allows you to set the attributes you want to show.
I dare say better than what we've currently got
>>>>>>>>>>
That's because most of what you currently have is pretty bad.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Thats odd. I live in Europe, also ordered Solaris 8 and it took them only 3 days to deliver. Considering the fact that I had to pay more for shipping & handling I think you're exagurating big time here.
That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want.
Read the site and that license again. Its not free software (yet?); "There are no fees for the right to use the software on computers with a capacity of eight or fewer processors", so it isn't free.
You "only need to register for your Solaris 8 Free 1-8 way license for Intel here and Sparc here ". I would not be surprised if you didn't even read the site properly and are now "illigally" using the software. I think you're coming close to trolling; you had all the options to see what you were buying, you could have read the FAQ to see that you are not getting a free OS so basicly I see no reason to start whining afterwards.
Besides; 2 CD's & 6 worth of junk? It somehow figures; I'd expect a reaction such as yours from someone who would call CD's filled with buttloads of documentation (docserver2), Staroffice, Oracle 8i SQL server (trial), JAVA tools and much utilities (GNU extras) junk.
IMHO you got no one to kick but yourself if you are unsatisfied.
Or as Stewart Brand says (in How Buildings Learn : What Happens After They're Built ) "Function melts form". Real users will bend any "grand" design forced upon them when it intefers with simply getting their work done. If Eazel's UI proves too cumbersome, power users will create themes to detour around annoying Eazel "features".
cpeterso
Every commercial UNIX I go to, I always have to compile bash and tar and grep and all those other goodies because the old UNIX equivalents of those programs invariably have fewer features and more bugs. Dump everything but the Solaris kernel and possibly the compiler and you'll have a great UNIX. Of course, the FSF will make you change the name to Gnu/Solaris, but it's a small price to pay.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Jesus H Christ, am I the only one that doesn't give two monkey turds about seeing big, huge massive, eye-candied, screen realestate hogging icons representing all of my files? I mean come on, some of those screen shots show all of 4 files in a window that is presumedly running in at least 800x600 resolution. This is user friendly? I just want to find and launch my files.
These bozo's think that somehow showing a text file's contents in the icon is going to help me find what I want? Yes, maybe if there are two files in a directory, but come on, what if I have a directory with 1000 documents? They are on crack.
I understand the desire to do something different, to strike out in new directions and not create yet another windows explorer or Mac Finder clone, but what they have done instead is create a gross parody of existing user interfaces, ala Aqua.
I think that Eazel will perhaps be marginally more successful that Microsoft's Bob, it looks just about as usable.
-josh
All the other serious Linux players deliver working code, watch the userbase grow and then maybe say yes when big vendors come knocking. These guys have got the order a little mixed up.
Nautilus isn't as good as Konquorer yet but the promoters talk up it's future features impressively. It isn't stable enough for regular work yet but alas, it's still alpha. So why is Sun committing to use this particular solution now?
It's called marketing. Basically if two companies can get together and announce something which sounds positive for both with only minimal long term risks, they will. That's why some of these guys are in both the KDE League and the Gnome Foundation. That's why the Gnome Foundation is not nearly as dangerous as most people make out. I.e. It will likely end up doing the same marketing job as the KDE League ( just more efficiently
Remember that it was 5 years between committing to CDE and actually shipping it for SUN. Even assuming a speedup for the open source arena we still won't see Gnome on your shiny new ultra 10 anytime soon. Unless you install it. By then Sun will likely ship 4 desktop environments. CDE, Open Windows, Gnome & KDE and that's the barest minimum.
You see these big old vendors are not stupid. At least no stupider than Mandrake and RedHat. Both of whom openly and loudly promote one desktop environment over all others yet ship all the popular free ones.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I just checked out the December screenshots of Eazel, and continue to be amazed at how slick it looks. This is good software written by people who understand how to cater to the end user. No one can accuse Nautilus of having a "built by programmers" look.
... it looks like we're going to see Linux sail past Windows in terms of plain old usability very soon.
Truly intuitive user interface, combined with intergration with StarOffice and Mozilla
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hate to be pessimistic, but with all the failures, layoffs, share prices plummeting...i hope Sun has a big war chest.
Here's the plan : Sun makes their OS look like Linux, and sells all the hardware they can make, even though you pay roughly 5x the cost of a Lintel solution. Granted, some of the Sun clustering and services are mind-blowing, but they won't be selling many 1s/2s this way. Although I'm sure the entrenched solaris shops will welcome the changes.
But will it be "in time"? 3dfx? Gone. Aetna? Thousands laid off. GM? Thousands laid off, oldsmobile line ended.Sun, MS? share prices plummet. Son of a Bush (SOB) is not even in the oval office yet, and the economy is already cratering. Has the republican feeding frenzy begun, after 6 years of incredible prosperity?
At least IBM has pledged 1B. to Linux endeavours. With the loss of the dot com money, a lot of people might not be able to do free software work anymore.
Or perhaps they will be doing a lot more?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Frankly, I'm glad Andy and a bunch of former Apple and Be engineers are bringing their expertise to Linux and GNOME. It says a lot about the direction we're headed.
I know Sun is an active member of the Gnome foundation, but they, along with many others are assuming that Eazel will be the best thing since sliced bread. Had it been released prior to KDE 2, I'd have probably agreed, but now it seems they're just putting all their eggs in one basket.
I think you are slightly off. Most successful Open Source projects benefit in one way or the other from corporate sponsorship either from developers being hired to hack the kernel full-time (like RedHat does with Alan Cox and a bunch of other Linux kernel hackers or like Netscape does for Mozilla) or contibuting code and/or advice (like IBM and Sun have done for the Apache project or Sun does with GNOME). Once most projects get large enough, there is usually positive corporate involvement.
I have never taken a particular interest in the GIMP project so I'm not sure if it bucks the trend or not.
Grabel's Law
on the page: http://www.eazel.com/screenshots/dec-07-2000
Just curious, I happen to live in that general area now... I guess one of the developers is from here or something?
OK, first the price. I should have been clear that that $175 was in local currency (Canadian dollars). $75 + shipping + GST + duty comes out to very very close to $175. (I think it was $172 and change)
And you must have a different meaning of free than I do. The right to use it on up to eight processor machines is free. There is no licensing fee for those computers. Sun throws the word "FREE!!!" around their site like popcorn, and yet you can't actually install it unless _you_ own the media. Can't borrow it from a friend, don't forget--that's a violation of the license agreement.
Believe me, I've read the FAQ.
For the record, I'm not running it on my own machines, legally or illegally. Once I get the console wired up, I'll be installing NetBSD until I acquire a legal copy of Solaris 8.
As for the six CDs of junk, they're junk. Why would I want to pay for a CD containing an OLD VERSION of a (crappy!) office suite? Besides, everything on those CDs is available for free and unrestricted download from one site or another. I've got the docs I need, I don't need a demo of Oracle 8i, and I will suffer through thumbscrews before using StarOffice 5.x (especially 5.1!) again.
My point is that it's a lot more expensive to get Solaris now that the license is free than it was when companies had to pay big bucks ($500--not that big!) for the license. Furthermore, claiming that the cost of the media is $75 is absurd. If they'd just be honest and say, "for a moderate fee" or the like, then I'd be happier.
Also, they've been promising a download option RSN, for about three months.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Over a remote X session Nautilus is totally worthless and I'd say a large chuck of Solaris desktop users are doing remote sessions a la eXceed. Can you downgrade that thing to 256 colors? I hope so because over X it takes a LONG time for that thing to paint all those pretty icons. Doesn't it use Mozilla libs for crips sake!
I wish someone would focus on the fundamentals rather than making it look great. Someone should make a file manager that works as well as WINFILE.EXE the old Windows file manager!
Looking at what's happening to tech stocks, I predict that Sun will have a new slogan very soon...
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
Call me an old curmudgeon if you will, and I won't necessarily deny it. However...
When is Sun going to get off their asses and allow Solaris to be downloaded, as they've been promising for months now? I know all about the 'free binary license' as long as you buy the media for $75USD plus shipping and handling. Up north of the US border, that amounts to about $175 by the time it gets to my door. That's a lot of money for a free OS on 2 CDs plus 6 CDs worth of junk that I don't want. Not bad for work, admittedly, but for my Sparc at home it's just silly, and a long ways from "FREE!!!"
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So I gather they are actually shipping a full Gnome 2.0. Why refer to it as just Eazel, there is a lot more to Gnome than just the file manager.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
I wasn't quoting... I agree that Sullivan said it first.... But, it is also quite clear that the phrase 'Form Follows function' is a defining one for the whole Bauhaus Movement. Form follows function came into general use as a phrase in the 30's in the States and the 40's in Europe. Gropius and his friends moved to the US around that time to get away from Nazi germany.
a i.html
However, some people have argued that the general concepts can be traced back much further - to the Italian jesuit monk Carlo Lodoli. The cornerstone of Lodoli's teaching was the maxim that nothing should be put on show (in rapresentazione) that was not in function (in funzione), that is, a working part of the structure.
(Good OO design/ Abstract Data Types ?)....
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2360/jm-eng.fff-h
So, arguably Lodoli said it first, in Italian, in 1750..
These ideas, plus the idea of organic architecture were all kicking around in the mid 18th century with people like Horatio Greenough writing about them. Mix in the purity of Asian and Japanese art that was getting seen in the west for the first time and it's not surprising that the same ideas were sprouting in different places at the same time (e.g. Charles Rennie Macintosh in Glasgow as he rejected the decoration of Art Nouveau for a more elegant simplicity).
You can't really call nautilus bloatware, for reasons of infrastructure. It uses bonobo to componentize everything, and calls each component when needed. So, when you start up nautilus, you're not actually running all of these things at once. This is pretty much exactly how explorer does it, and no one calls that bloated.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
It's Eazel, as in "ease". It's just as cutesy as idiotic Mac names like Finder, Chooser, IRCle, and Fetch, along with stupid concepts like "suitcase" and "trash". Of course, every Mac user is also familiar with such dirty terms as "software conflicts", "need more RAM", and "troubleshoot". In any general conversation about computers with a stranger, you can sniff out a Mac user withing fifteen seconds because one of the above terms will fly out of their mouth.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03