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."

Comments

Re:2.0? Why, oh why?

[Dingleberry]

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...

Re:Sun and GNOME

[JoeBuck]

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.

Re:Sun and GNOME

[DeadMoose]

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.

Re:Sun and GNOME

[nslu]

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

Q. Why did Sun choose to support GNOME instead of KDE?

A. GNOME and KDE are both powerful desktop environments. Sun has completed a comprehensive technical review of both environments and concluded that GNOME's architecture is a better match for Sun's software strategy, which promotes the creation and use of highly distributed, network-savvy software, as well as easy access to data wherever it might be located. One example is GNOME's innovative use of CORBA for network-aware interprocess communication between disparate systems. Others are the Bonobo component architecture, which enables easier creation of compound documents and system-wide scripting while promoting code reuse, and GConf, the network- and component-aware configuration management system.

Performance still needs work

[green pizza]

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.

Re:Performance still needs work

[acoopersmith]

Check out the Sun GNOME 2.0 Performance Troubleshooting Guide. Perhaps it can help you.

Re:Performance still needs work

[Animixer]

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.

Your sunblade 150 is a fairly low-end machine, not that you would think it would take much horsepower to make a snappy feeling gui. Basically put, I've used many classes of Sun workstations/servers (from SparcStation IPX to SunFire V880), and the gui 'feels' horribly slow on all of them. The system underneath can do things very quickly and reliably, but nothing 'feels' fast. For example, my workstation at work is a Sun Blade 1000 (essentially a SunFire 280R in a desktop case), dual 750 usparc3's, fc-al disks, and the same old video card as you. Still feels slow. I have a p2-233 at home with a matrox millenium, 128mb of 70ns ram, and a couple crusty narrow-scsi barracudas, and running CDE on it feels a couple orders of magnitude faster than the sun workstation. Granted, any real work being done goes much quicker on the SunBlade.

I think the problem lies in several areas. First, the pgx-64 has been around for a few years and was probably several generations behind in video acceleration when it came out. Second, I don't think there's too much video acceleration going on with the sun video cards (excluding those that do opengl). I think this is the primary problem. Third, the feel issue. Maybe Xsun is just set up to not update ultra-fast, or maybe it's set by default to make background applications get most of the cycles? Wish I knew how to configure it to try and update the screen at about 10x the current rate...based on the cpu usage of Xsun, it's GOT to be sitting around twiddling it's thumbs between screen updates.

Something is just skewed with X's response time. Granted, gnome will use more cycles to display the fancy graphics, but what I'm talking about is very noticiable even with CDE. CDE feels fast on HP workstations, such as the B2000, which is fairly old. Feels fine on alphas too. I have mixed emotions of ibm/aix. X HAULS on SGI from r4400 based workstations and up (early 90's). Sun.....just feels slow for the gui, everything else runs just dandy!

p.s. In case you're interested, the sunblade you have most likely uses the same pc133 ECC SDRAM DIMMS (cas 3) as a sunblade 100, a seagate barracuda IDE disk, and has a slightly higher-clocked CrippleSparc(tm) processor, which has significantly less cache than the 'real' server-model UltraSparc IIs. My favorite part is running a 'prtdiag' and have it say '1-way memory interleaving'! :-)

Security Hole in Solaris GNOME 2.0

[dananderson]

Please read this message at http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/gnome/get/#downl oad:
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 /usr/lib/gnome-print-manager-remote

Re:I realize this isn't a support form, but -

[steve.m]

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.

Re:Sun and GNOME

[Frater 219]

If I write a GNOME app, I alienate all the KDE users out there. If I release a KDE app, I alienate the GNOME users.

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.)