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Gnome 2.0 Officially Available For Solaris
MoonRider writes "Today, Sun Microsystems announced the availability of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop for the Solaris Operating Environment.
You could already download beta versions of the Gnome 2.0 desktop but this is the "official" release that will replace CDE as the default desktop for the Solaris operating system. You can get it on the Sun website."
You could already download beta versions of the Gnome 2.0 desktop but this is the "official" release that will replace CDE as the default desktop for the Solaris operating system. You can get it on the Sun website."
Sun has been working on Gnome 2.0 with the Gnome community. It's not exactly a stock Gnome 2.0 installation. You might want to check it out before giving it the thumbs down...
If Sun chose KDE, then they'd be in the position of either writing checks to TrollTech with every sale, or telling their customers that they can't develop proprietary apps without buying a separate license from TrollTech.
In practice, though, a number of software companies are already selling Qt-based apps on Solaris.
This is intirely incorrect... check out LD_LIBRARY_PATH sometime... you can have a ~/lib with all the libs you want to run things out of your user account... you can even override system libs with LD_PRELOAD.
Well, first off there's the entry in their FAQ, titled "Why did Sun choose to support GNOME instead of KDE?", but that's a bit light on details.
A couple years ago I went to a presentation from Sun about Gnome, and they went into more details, but my slides are at home. The couple that leap to mind though: there were the licensing questions with QT. There was also the fact that Gnome's C based rather than C++, and the large portion of Sun folk were much more comfortable working w/ C rather than C++.
When I get home, I'll dig up my slides, and if they add anything more to this discussion (since lots more people will probably respond by then, and I'm not sure how indepth they went into this particular topic), I'll append something more.
sun has predicted this kind of questions and answered in their FAQ
quoting from http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/faq/genera lfaq.html#4q0
I just got done trying out this release of GNOME on a SunBlade 150 (550 MHz UltraSPARC II, 512 MB RAM, PGX-64 graphics). It works and it's kinda snazzy, but it's mighty slow. I don't know if it's the fault of my low end hardware or maybe the software itself, but this beast really makes my machine chug.
While Motif has often been considered bloated in the past, CDE (which is Motif based) runs like a champ on this machine. The look and feel is pretty stark, but it does the job and is easy on my hardware.
Hopefully Sun will have GNOME zipping along by the time 2.1 ships. I would imagine there are still many tweaks that can be implemented.
Because the libraries used by applications written for gnome (gtk and friends) are LGPL, while the library (QT) used by applications written for KDE is either GPL or available from Trolltech for $$$.
All developers for Sun would either have to make only GPL software (not likely) or purchase a third party library to write (GUI) apps for Solaris. It really isn't an option for Sun to make developers purchase a third-party library because a) the developers would not tolerate it and b) it gives Trolltech control over the Solaris platform. Imagine hat would happen if Trolltech refused to license QT for comercial use to some or all developers.
For Sun to have gone with KDE for the desktop, they would have had to purchase rights to license and distribute QT to developers under a comercial license. And they would still not have any control over the developement of QT.
Please read this message at http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/get/#downl oad: /usr/lib/gnome-print-manager-remote
a security vulnerability in the GNOME Print Manager could allow unauthorized reading of files. To resolve this issue, after installation of GNOME 2.0, execute the following command (as root user):
chmod u-s
It requires 600MB disk space, doubt you could squeeze it in under 100MB
No, *YOU* are entirely incorrect - it ships in PKG format, so you'd have to be root to install it corectly. Even if you did extract all the files and copy them into ~/bin and ~/lib I think you'd probably run into some static dependency (it's built to install in /usr/gnome). He's using a SunRay, so the only other problem to work around is how to actually start it. Solaris is set to ignore .xinitrc by default (somewere down /usr/dt - i'm not at work right now). Why not just ask the sysadmin to install it. It's just another option on the login screen then.
I dug up my slides, and beyond the dated tutorials of basic GTK+ work, and some ancient screenshots, it doesn't add much.
They've got a slide with a few buzzwords about why Gnome's so much better than CDE, but I guess all the talk of Gnome/GTK+ versus KDE/QT was done during Q&A
But if memory serves it was basically what everyone's saying; they liked C more than C++, and they didn't want to worry about QT licensing for themselves or anyone else (since saying "it's free to develop for our platform!" is more enticing than "it's almost free; you just have to pay QT royalties")
Nonsense. The vast majority of people who happen to be running either KDE or GNOME are neither football hooligans nor jingoists about it. They will run whatever applications will help them get their job done. There is after all nothing about the KDE window manager which woukd make GNOME apps quit working, nor vice versa.
I use KDE chiefly because I like its window manager, its browser, and its flavor of xterm. That doesn't stop me from running GNOME and GTK applications, such as dia or nessus. (And I'm glad it doesn't, since I'm a security technician and would be a little hosed without nessus.)
If you are concerned about "alienating" the football hooligan type of user -- well, recall the old Chinese parable about the man, his son, and the donkey. You can't please everyone, and if you try to please all the fanatics, you just end up falling in the river.
(Regarding the mistaken idea that the friendly competition between GNOME and KDE constitutes "wasted effort", I will only direct the reader to the second of my ways to make yourself look stupid. The existence of choice is itself valuable, not a waste.)
..and your admin will LOVE you if /tmp happens to be a swap filesystem :-)
-- I speak only for myself.
I know many Sun users who liked CDE because it was stable as a rock.
Oh yeah? Rocks come to my mind when I think of CDE, but for different reasons. For example, I liked it because of all of the gaping security holes in tooltalk that take Sun forever to patch whenever they crop up.
It's basically re-branded RedHat (7.x if I remember correctly) meant to run on their Cobalt rack-mounted blades (up to 2 Intel CPUs; 2 ethernet cards; 6GB of RAM (4GB segmented), up to SCSI drives, etc.)
OK, here's the disclaimer. I've been using the betas (1, 2, and 3) since they were first released. I don't know how much of the following is still valid information, although I suspect all of it is.
To MASSIVELY increase performance of Gnome 2.0 on Solaris...
1) Install the mlib libraries.
2) Do a CUSTOM installation, and make sure that 64 bit libraries are included if your hardware is 64 bit. (they weren't by default in the betas)
3) Don't use transparent windows.
4) Don't use a fancy bitmapped background.
5) If you do, store it on your local drive. (we had problems with NIS/autoFS users keeping their bitmaps in their home directories--on the server)
5) Add more memory.
6) Add more memory.
I was using the Beta3 on a blade100/550MHz with 128MB of RAM. It was almost unusable, when Mozilla was running. Now I have a Blade150/650MHz with 512MHz of RAM, and it's fast. Faster than CDE ever was on anything that existed when CDE was first introduced. With Gnome 2.0, Mozilla, Staroffice/Openoffice, Acroread, and mediaplayer, I can get away from Windows for all non-game requirements.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
" Explain why the other main open source desktop software from Sun -- OpenOffice -- was German based?"
Was and is are two different things... but first...
OpenOffice is not from Sun. Sun does not sell or provide OpenOffice to its customers. Sun bought StarDivision, and then the StarOffice source was then released to the OpenSource community as a both a great gift and a great way to attack Microsoft Office. OpenOffice will slowly tear into one of Microsoft's two profitably divisions, and in the end may well destroy it.
At the same time, StarOffice is now a proprietary American product with an American company in charge from a government point of view. Toss a pretty Gnome gui and anti-aliased fonts on top of it, and the office UNIX geeks no longer need a Windows workstation next to the Solaris box. It's a win-win situation for Sun.
I have been using gnome now for about 1 1/2 years while working at SUN. I have been using their pre-release of 1.4 and recently they have "rolled out" version 2, which I was eagerly awaiting. But I'm not impressed. 2 has been less stable than 1.4 (and it is pretty bad on the stability front). It has too many bugs. For example on the version I have here you can't log out since you can't be sure that all of your settings will be saved (Wasen't very happy when I discovered that :( ). To be honest I am a bit baffled by the fact that they would release this yet. Personally I don't think its ready.