Slashdot Mirror
Gnome for Solaris 8 Preview
jiggywhiteboy writes: "Sun has released a preview version of the Gnome desktop for Solaris 8.
The release includes version 1.4 of the desktop, Nautilus, Gnome-VFS, Bonobo, and GConf. Sun warns: "Exploring the GNOME 1.4 Desktop is an unsupported prerelease of the next-generation desktop for the Solaris Operating Environment. Given its prerelease status, we recommend that this software be installed on a non-mission-critical system, and used only by those who regularly test prerelease products" Try it out!"
Of course I'm also pissed now Sun is saying Openwin support will end soon. CDE sux too.
You're a babbling moron.
When you purchase an Enterprise machine and a Sun Storedge array you get Veritas Volume Manager for free. Journaling file system is built into the OS now too. This configuration (two hosts and a RAID array) can also be used in the Sun Clustering software (vs MC/Service Guard).
The only difference between the actual offerings are that you have to buy the Sun disk array. Yeah, they're turds like that, but they have good stuff.
I've worked with both too (Solaris currently, HP-UX for 3 years previous), but my experience with both shows the Sun stuff as more stable than the HP. A busted 3 host Service Guard cluster, crazy NFS lockups and process hangs from the HP stuff. I also saw total weird garbage on Solaris 2.5.1, but it's aincent.
Give me the skinny the benchmarks.
Why?
1. Put the backdrop in $HOME/.dt/backdrops
2. Use the "Desktop Controls" to select your new backdrop.
How is Gnome going to make this easier?
I've had a midget on my desktop and lately he's getting a little obnoxious. A Gnome would be a nice change of scenery!
Phew! Glad I'm not the only one who thought the imagery on GNOME Panel menu is slightly confusing.
The "Lock" for "Lock screen" is in category "cute but misleading" - I haven't yet seen a monitor that I need to lock with a padlocks to turn on a screen saver.
And "logout" icon (the night sky in monitor thing) was sort of confusing too, yes. It would fit on a screensaver better, I think. (And term "lock screen" sounds rather, uh, harsh - "Screen saver with password" might be too long, though.)
> Is it just assumed that Sawfish is it nowadays?
Pretty much, yes. KDE has KWM and Gnome (now) has Sawfish. It may even be included in the official Gnome "releases" though I haven't checked.
Sure, you can use other WM's, but I can understand why Sun wouldn't want to advertise that fact. It would confuse most users. The division of labor among programs that make up our graphical shells isn't commonly understood, even by experienced users. And there isn't much need for them user to understand this division, anyway. If they want to learn, they'll figure it out quickly enough anyway.
And I'll take a moment to praise Sun for moving away from the badly dated CDE, and towards a more modern DE. And thank heavens they picked Gnome instead of trying to create another homespun, closed, proprietary system.
It is worth noting that the acceptance of Gnome as an standard, common system among commercial Unix vendors represents a large step towards the vision that RMS layed out in the GNU Manifesto.
Viva la revolution!
--Lenny
I think this falls under the "mere aggregation" clause and thus there is no problem.
It is true that I have never seen a Linux X that supports multiple main-layer visuals. However I consider it a good thing, it is a waste of hardware to support these legacy apps. This is an area where a commercial entity like Sun can compete with Linux.
I can sympathise with these users. I've been using Gnome for over a year, and I always gave up when trying to find out how to change font size.
What's wrong with Gnome that there needs to be a special version for Sun? Can't you just build it on a solaris box and be done with it? Or are there pathological bindings to Linux? Why? Does fixing it for Sun also fix it for other platforms?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
um... err.... Ya got me there! Yep, mid 2002. I best set my watch now....
Yes, Gnome is on the Solaris media. Version 1.2. The download is version 1.4. Also remember, this is a *BETA*. If people want to use it for production, don't gripe if the bells and whistles blow up in your face. The OFFICIAL release of GNOME for Solaris will be in mid-2000, if people would bother to read the accompanying docs. By that time GNOME should at version 2.0 and life will not be as miserable.
And what they really lack is consistency
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen, philosophers, and divines......with consistency a great mind simply has nothing to do...." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
-
The system library exception of the GPL does not hold "when that component itself accompanies the executable". Which means that the propriatary system components of Solaris would have to be released as source when GNOME is bundled with a future Solaris release.
There is more discussion on this topic on the Gnotices GNOME news site
Sun also ships numerous workstations and the Gnome environment is far better than CDE, IMHO as a workstation environment. Solaris is not just used for serving pages, running databases, and the like. It is used for Unix programming at many very large corporations (Unigraphics Solutions, e.g. where I used to work). It's used in the graphics industry, and it's very prolific in academia for workstation use. Many campuses have several sparc/solaris labs for engineering/programming/graphics work.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Then just click the font button and select the one you want.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
What the study is saying, in that slide, is that many users who had never seen Gnome before were confused by the logout icon in Gnome (i.e. the picture of a monitor with a half-moon in it). It makes sense that a user who doesn't know what that icon is supposed to represent might think it puts the monitor to sleep or something. The icon itself is not obvious.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
You don't have to know what's going on under the hood. I was just describing the process of changing the default font in Gnome if you want to use a different one. If you're happy with the default, which many users are, you don't ever have to touch that. And if you do want to change it, it really isn't difficult. It's all done graphically from the control center.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
- Sun's Slide Presentation
- Test Script used in the study
- Comments and conclusions taken from the study
Enjoy.----
Celebrate the finer things in life
I'll bite at the troll just to save others some trouble.
GNOME IS NOT A WINDOWMANAGER.
GNOME *IS* A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT.
The two are two separate things. You can run windowmaker just fine and still run gnome apps if it so pleases you. I realize you made note that you realized the two were separate but you didn't finish it that way. Give you windowmaker and keep the feet of the desktop? So run windowmaker and don't run the gnome panel or nautilus or anyother gnome application that you deem buggy or incomplete.
As far as the multiple monitor issue, does openwindows support multihead? Or does Solaris 8 ship with XFree86?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Have the results of this usability testing been released or posted back to the Gnome mailing lists? I would be curious to see the results.
What do you mean by "this"? Sun's GNOME 1.4 packages were just released, that's after all what this article is about. GNOME 1.4 itself has barely been out for a couple of months. Judging from your comment, you could as well be talking about an ancient GNOME 1.2.
It sucks. It's so buggy and incomplete. There are so many problems, like getting multiple monitors working with Gnome, or getting that horrible sound daemon working right. There are so many bugs in the configuration menus for gnome/sawmill that it is rediculous.
Suspicion confirmed. Let me kindly suggest that you update. Sawfish hasn't been called "Sawmill" for a long time now, and it sounds like you are using a very unupdated GNOME 1.2 setup.
It's not surprising. Sun chose to go with a POS enviornment like GNOME that is still very Linux oriented, of course there are a lot of problems with it.
Let me suggest that you update and keep up with the pace of new versions, before calling anything a POS. GNOME is an actively developed desktop environment, contrary to CDE. It changes fast.
That said, it's better than CDE.
Now that's what I call an understatement.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Lets assume that you had to use software that required a pseudocolor visual (thats 8 bit color, and there are lots of such commercial apps) and you run native in 24 bit color. What do you do?
Log the fuck out, configure the damn Xserver for pseudo, and restart. What a waste.
On sun what do you do? Pop up the damn window, no wait. Granted sgi does overlays, but sgi is dead already they just dont know it yet.
Ever say "No thanks, I have enough RAM"?
Yes, it does. As long as the frame buffer
supports it (all Sun cards do).
Personally I don't know anyone who runs any window manager on production machine.
Well, I think that's the problem. I recall a day when the majority of computing and scientific professionals had a Sun or other Unix workstation on their desktop. Now they all use Windows NT.
Gnome is Sun's shot at offering a viable desktop environment and to perhaps recover some of the desktop marketshare. I certainly welcome the effort.
75 Solaris machines? Where we these a few years ago? I thought most of the labs were running a mix of Unix and Windoze these days...
Sorry for the offtopic post. Just the confused babblings of an alumnus.
jMC
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
wookin' pa nub in all the wrong pwaces
Actually Solaris is used pretty heavily as a development platform especially within the telecom and financial industries.
I use Netscape 4.73 at work under Solaris (same at home under Linux), but there's also a Netscape 6.0 build for Solaris available from Sun, not to mention Mozilla or you can even build Konqueror for Solaris without much effort.
It will immediately improve the look n feel of Sun's desktop. Those pink windows and oversized menu-bar make me squeamish.
However if Sun really wants to make a contribution to the UNIX desktop, they should release a Java UI toolkit that uses native GTK+ widgets.
Hell, Sun might even devote some development resource to Nautilus, which is (for me) unusable due to its sluggishness.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I'd migrate to Gnome over a Sun machine anytime, their CDE is just muderous, although I personally prefer using a Zoot installing of RH should I be working on Sun, and I can't wait till either Open or NetBSD do something solid for the U series (other than for U5's think.. U10's, Sunblades)
Either way its genuinely nice news to hear open source projects moving on, and doing something new every day, in fact it overshadows the bad news we see, Mandrake, Slackware, Eazel, however as for the not running on production machines comment... Personally I don't know anyone who runs any window manager on production machine.
Want Root?
I thought one of the main points to Gnome was Average Joe user could use it without knowing what was under the hood and actually understand how to use the computer properly from the first time they sat down.
Espcially by tons of Solaris SysAdmins that crave to be like Linux... Or was that the oth... nevermind.
Be still my heart... UNIX users being required to know 3 vi commands?!?!?!? What is this world coming to!
There are lots of solaris users (i know someone who works in finance, for example) who could use a better desktop than CDE *who work for SUN*. If only for this is it a good idea.
However, with the Blade and other new machines, Sun is also courting the CAD and video markets, so there's another reason...
just my blog and pix
I have the same problem. In addition, if I start it up in multihead mode I get just a desktop on monitor #1.
I stopped using xin a long time ago because netscape won't run with it between a C3D and a PGX32, and there are odd color issues.
Hope something changes in that arena. I can't take GNOME seriously at work until it does. After I begged for three heads for so long, I'd have a hard time if the boss came by and only one of the three monitors was lit up :-)
I'm currently writing this on my new Gnome desktop running on a SPARC5! My little old piece of history has never looked better. Cheers to all who contributed. And a big thanks.
Last April I switched to SuSE after being a longtime (1993) Slackware user so I could get the Ximian Gnome stuff. They release 1.4. Dude! But without a version for SuSE 7.1. Bogus! The web page has been saying Real Soon Now for the last month. Maybe I should give up and run KDE.
Power + Attitude = Performance
Paper out on drive J:
Then you'll probably be disappointed since the
hardware requirements for this release list a
24bpp graphics card as a requirement.
Allright! Now it's going to take an hour to open a "folder" on my sun too!
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
I've been using this at work for a couple months now. It sucks. It's so buggy and incomplete. There are so many problems, like getting multiple monitors working with Gnome, or getting that horrible sound daemon working right. There are so many bugs in the configuration menus for gnome/sawmill that it is rediculous.
It's not surprising. Sun chose to go with a POS enviornment like GNOME that is still very Linux oriented, of course there are a lot of problems with it.
That said, it's better than CDE.
Give me windowmaker any day, and keep those feet off my desktop.
Probably because I tried Gnome on Linux before as well, and it had similar bugs, when it comes to the GUI configuration tool, at least. It is less buggy, sure, but that doesn't mean it runs well or is without more than its share of bugs. ;)
Keep those feet off my desktop, no matter which OS I'm running.
I've had Solaris 8/KDE on my Ultra 10 workstation since I set it up 6 months ago! KDE and Gnome ship with Solaris 8 in the install media kit, on the same cd with GCC, gtar, gnu/emacs, Ethereal, and an entire cd of GNU tools. Don't y'all use SunFreeware or Sun BigAdmin for your Solaris/GNU packages?
I'm currently using Debian GNU/Linux, which supports both the NIC and the CD-ROM out-of-the-box. All the same, I'd still kill to have UNIX on a laptop that doesn't cost $20k (as the UltraSPARC Tadpoles do). But no laptop vendor actually supports this, and I'm not going to buy a laptop only to discover that some miniscule hardware revision means [soup NAZI voice]: "No UNIX for you!"
I've been thinking, would it be possible for IBM to port AIX to a G4 PowerBook? PPC is PPC, right? ;-p
I used to use FreeBSD exclusively, and of course it installed fine on the 560X, but its poor Java support eliminates it as a viable option. There's also the issue of its unclear future. I agree with the "*BSD is dying" posts; it's sad but true but there's no room for an x86/Alpha Unix with no commercial software support... a good gauge of a OS's viability is, "can I get Oracle for it?" You can even get Oracle for GNU/Linux these days, but not for FreeBSD.
But I may have found a solution... I'm going to order XiG's AccelX server and CDE for Linux, get reeeeally drunk, slap a Sun sticker on my laptop, and repeat over and over: "This is a Solaris laptop. This is a Solaris laptop. This is a Solaris laptop..."
--
--
I like to watch.
That doesn't necessarily mean that something shouldn't be done to make it more obvious, but no matter what you do, no one's going to be able to guess what every single icon on the screen does just by looking at a screenshot.
My .sig is remarkably appropriate for this discussion...
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Okay, fine. They're using GTk. That will make installing GIMP and other goodies a lot easier. However, I couldn't find which Gnome compliant window manager they're using. Is it just assumed that Sawfish is it nowadays?
I have to disagree with your statement. Solaris Boxen are found in a great many research, engineering and academic environments as workstations.
As a research programmer, I use a solaris Ultra 5 on a regular basis along side with my Linux/Intel Box. This Gnome 1.4 release from sun is welcome, and is currently happily chugging away through the install process right beside me. I have, in the past, installed and compiled Gnome 1.2 on the same machine and a Computing Lab full of Ultra 5's.
The problem with the solaris boxen (when using precompiled or compiled on the boxes themselves) was the occasional app crash due to some of the Gnome libraries. Having a compiled version from Sun themselves gives us regular Solaris users something to cheer about.
Although heavily proprietary, I've had excellent experiences with Sun products on the Solaris machines. I am also sure that the Sun people have tweaked many of the bugs out of the distribution of Gnome.
Additionally, it's great to see Sun licensing and supporting OSS. Three cheers for Sun, and many thanks...
i think motif is okay, but in all honesty gnome is moving farther, faster than motif/cde (so is KDE, i wish there was a free Qt replacement).
add the fact that this is a free os, supported by pros, which also runs on the x86 architecture, and a stable version might be a decent alternative for people who phear the penguin.
congrats, sun, on taking some risk.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
. . .
But I don't get this. . .
From Slide 13 :
"Participant Profiles Next generation GNOME users - Business, Scientific, and Creative Professionals Computer Literate and Savvy
Is how they describe their testers.
But this is what happens. . .
From Slide 16 :
'Icon Design and Tooltips 11 out of 12 users misundersood the logout icon, thinking it was for:
Am I missing something here? Have I not been using a GUI for long enough?
Actually this solaris user needs GNOME.
I happen to use X-Terms at uni, and i HATE CDE. I would much rather use gnome.
Sure i could compile my own WM and run that insted, but that would give the uni grounds for removing my access for "not using the systems for purposes relate to my Course". That and the fact that i would need to take a back up as they wipe user accounts every semester/year (this years policy has not been made clear), and it is a pain getting a lot of data from that box (firewalled insanely). That and my quota being rather small, ie: barely enough to do my WORK, let alone store a wm.
Enough about myself, what about those students who dont even know what unix is, let alone how to use this machine, hell it is amusing watching some of these 2nd/3rd year students try to get an X-Term up. A the GNOME (win95 lookalike) interface would be a godsend here.
So in summation, it is my opinion that GNOME would be nice for Solaris, seeing as the Uni still uses it (fyi: University of South Australia - Levels Campus, machine name: logic.)
PS:And dont sun also sell WORKSTATIONS? Things that sit on desks with screens. If i am not mistaken are not also SunRays [terminal computing/advanced xterms that use smartcards and are stateless] used with a GUI? The connnect to say an EXXX->E10K(yeah over kill) which is the server, but they run X? GNOME be nice there to meethinks!
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Solaris is in use mainly as a server operating system at the moment
Just in case you didn't know, there are still plenty of Solaris desktops being used by the US. govt. I think it's a great idea that Sun is trying to give their current (and potential) customers a functional, inexpensive, and hopefully standard desktop.
So while you think Sun should completely ignore the desktop market, I don't and apparently someone at Sun doesn't either.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Probably because:
a) Solaris x86 has a small user base.
b) Solaris x86 sucks.
It's not the slow-ass filesystem, but the shitty IDE suport Solaris
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Remember, lots of people use SUN boxes for things besides just servers. I'm a grad student at WSU and we use all SUN workstations. I'd love to have a better looking desktop than CDE.
enuff said
http://saveie6.com/
Our company doesn't need e-mail that badly.
If anything goes wrong I can just blame Sun, right?
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
I work for Sun and recall seeing an email a few months ago asking for both technical and non-technical users to undergo usability testing with Gnome. This is one of the best things to come out of Sun's stewardship; they're able to do due diligence and add the missing ingredients that the OS community never could (or would). If you ever want to see UNIX or Linux broadly deployed on the desktop, this is the first big step in that direction.
The only certainty is entropy.
Since when does servers not need guis?
:-)
Maybe if it's a webserver or a DB server. What about a terminal server?
Is it me or are most people forgetting just what a great thing *nix is for driving Xterms
With the TCO for PCs finally being acknowledged and *nix running on mainframes. How long before big companies start going back to a centralised architecture? Dump that obselete expensive Pc and give the users a cheap, reliable exterm. Most users would not realise the desktop they're accessing is located anywhere other than on their machine.
So gnome on Solaris is a big deal for Sun, replace those noisy, unreliable PCs with our sleek quite net appliances. Look how clean the desktop is, better than old XP.
Supposing my company runs some Solaris 8 boxes and I have been using my Linux workstation with Gnome windows manager to telnet to them and/or ssh for work stuff, is it possible that I can get this stuff installed on a server and run a solaris gnome xwindow session from my server? If so, where would be a good source of docs for how to establish just such a remote session?
I work at Sun and can honestly say that most of us
are using workstation class machines (U1, U2, U10, U60). I think GNOME is a great enhancement for those of us using a Sun box each day for "normal" activities.
I for one, use Solaris 8 SPARC edition almost exclusively. It is required at my office, owing to all the Sun hardware we use here; and I run an Ultra 5 at home in lieu of any PC or Mac.
I've been running Helix's Gnome implementation for awhile now, and am pretty happy with it. Hopefully Sun's implementation is a little less buggy.
I've found through my own personal experience that I can't beat the performance I get out of Gnome on Solaris 8 SPARC. Far more stable and reliable than any Linux or Windoze combination on any platform (except, perhaps, Mac OS X).
--Nathan
I support 75 Solaris machines in one of the larger computer labs on the Columbia University campus. This lab is used by many undergraduates who have never seen UNIX before, and frankly, CDE muddles many of the. We've tweaked the "Control Bar" thing that shows up at the bottom of the screen to make things nicer, but when I think how much easier it would be to use GNOME instead I drool. Right now, if a user wants to do something as simple as setting a customized background (as opposed to the builtins), they have to edit their .dtprofile in addition to changing some settings using the CDE controls. The Gnome Control Center gives them much more power, all with one graphical interface.
Is there any easier way to access the consoles of multiple Sun boxes than telnetting to a terminal server?
Ancient Budo Master once told me: "All your bruises are belong to us."
Perhaps the poster is a Sun employee. I have been playing with 1.4 since February.
Ancient Budo Master once told me: "All your bruises are belong to us."
True enough, I guess, but it is used as a workstation OS in enough research and academic institutions that Gnome won't go completely unused.
Ryan T. Sammartino
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I'll withhold judgment on the viability of the Gnome desktop over KDE on my Sparc 10 untill I see how well or poorly it runs with 8bpp. However this is a very nice chunk o' software to see. I've tried to get Gnome for Solaris a few times but got fed up after trying to hundred the 20th of a hundred plus packages. Getting the entire thing in one TGZ file is a major bonus. The only way this could be a bad thing is if it fails to integrate with the Solaris login screen (where the user can pick the desktop and WM they want).
For one thing, there are people like me, who maintain Sun systems all day and who essentially require solaris on the desktop. I use solaris every day as my main GUI, and what window manager to I use? Why, that would afterstep. I more modern window manager probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
Yes, I know I could build it myself, but it's nice to see Sun admit that CDE wasn't cutting it, and that they should just find something else. I like that it will be a standard on Solaris, and I like that it will be included, so I don't have to compile it myself.
Where is your evidence for this ? The SunRay platform is very popular - and rightly so. I use Solaris on a SunRay and am running the latest Gnome build on it. I think that a better question would be "Which Solaris user needs CDE".
BTW. I can tell you why Sun has adopted Gnome as its desktop: Gnome is very network centric what with Bonobo and all that. This fits in very well with Sun's vision blah blah blah. Not that I'm biased or anything !
Claric
--
There's no problem that cannot be solved with a suitable amount of high explosives
Now only if Ximian would hurry up their porting efforts & make that nice easy to install tool available for Solaris Intel..... for some reason they only like Solaris Sparc.... then I could get frequent updates, which sun doesn't provide.
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Actually the term "Solaris" for Sun's OS came out from an internally held contest shortly after the SunSoft spinoff subsidiary was formed earlier which was chartered to move the installed base off of the older BSD-based SunOS to the newer System V-based SunOS.
Additionally, SunSoft was supposed to be less tied to Sun hardware and more platform independent and ported to PC's, etc. Therefore they didn't just want a new version # for SunOS, which they thought might be more associated with older Sun hardware setups and confusing to newer customers (System V folks, PC folks, etc.) they were trying to attract. They wanted a new marketing name to be more associated with the System V OS that was coming out then. I'm guessing that Apple has had much the same reasons to name their new OS "OS X" rather than "MacOS 10". However, most still wanted to have the name show a "Sun" influence of some sort, which influenced the submitted entries.
A lot of us in our entries, including myself, came up with "Solaris" as our suggestions (and I have to admit I was influenced in my thoughts by the movie as well). Bill Larson who then was SunSoft's VP of marketing, probably should be credited of leading the charge to making the name shift to "Solaris".
Also, Solaris was viewed more as an "environment" than just an OS which "SunOS" implied, and therefore a superset of what was traditionally put in SunOS. However, shortly afterwards they did things like unbundle things like C, etc. too, who some weren't too happy about.
Whenever I try with xinerama (which works fine with CDE... gag), dt attempts to launch sawfish (or twm) and I never even get the Gnome startup screen, it just dumps back to dt.
On a side note: Does anyone know whether Solaris is named Solaris because of the name of it's producing company or has anyone thought of Stanislaw Lem's great novel Solaris where the planet of Solaris is inhabited by an immense monocellular living intelligent ocean that is too large and too complex to understand?
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
along with the actual licenses