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.

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