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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."
Gnome 1.4 is very nice. 2.0 still has a long way to go. I wish they wouldn't turn off so many Solaris users by giving them something half-baked. Then again, if they're willing to put up with CDE, they're probably willing to use _anything_.
That SUN is finally replacing the archaic CDE. However, there seems to be a pretty large gap in release time. GNOME 2.2 is almost out. Will it be "officially" released for Solaris onc GNOME 2.4 comes out? I don't think Sun is doing a service to Solaris users here by using such a old version. One could argue that they made sure that everything is stable, but the fact is that GNOME 2.2 itself has more bug fixes from GNOME 2.0.
I really do wonder what took the people at Sun so long to realise they should replace CDE with something "fresher". Frankly I think CDE was getting a little bit outdated. Hopefully this'll put Solaris closer to the people ;)
Because Sun didn't want to pay royalties for proprietary non-open applications they developed against KDE, perhaps?
Probably "Yes" to the fact that GNOME is more enterprise support, but "No" to Ximian-based support. I think a large part of the decision is based on the fact that GNOME and GTK are LGPL, and thus "friendlier" to ISV's who want to write proprietary apps using them.
And (IANAKDEU) but think GNOME's accessibility support _may_ have had something to do with it.
Motif/CDE's design philosophy could be boiled down to one phrase: "Make everything look 3D except the menubar!"
... if it's "in" it must be on, unless the light source is the lower right corner of the screen ... then ... ummm ... wait.)
Remember when checkbuttons and radiobuttons could only be differentiated by innie/outtie appearance? (Now let's see
I always thought XView was clever and a lot more user-friendly: you'd be paging through a huge document by clicking in the scrollbar. And when the thumb got too close, it'd warp the pointer for you so you didn't have to pay attention to the interface elements, just the content. Smart.
Oh well, at least GNOME's quite a bit prettier.
Stupid question time: why can't you believe that they'd pick gnome for technical reasons. I've never heard or seen anything concrete one way or the other; I've found that they perform similarly, and gnome has a nicer look/feel/layout (imo).
Any link or direct explination (unbiased preferably) as to the pluses/minuses would be nice.
Can anyone remind me why Sun chose GNOME over KDE or any other desktop environment? Was it because RedHat has adopted GNOME as their default desktop, or they liked the look of Ximian GNOME? Because I can't really believe that they chose GNOME purely on technical reasons.
There were probably a raft of reasons rather just one. GTK is written in C, so it's an easier task to tie GTK to anything already existing than QT would be. Sun needed to find an architecture with strong accessibility features and they may have felt that GNOME would be easier to get those accessibility features in ...
Probably the clincher though is the licensing of GTK. It's LGPL, rather than GPL. So Sun can take their proprietary stuff and dynamically link it to the GTK libraries and keep their proprietary stuff proprietary and closed. With QT, they would either have had to completely open their sources up under the GPL or they would have to have licensed the QT libraries from Trolltech. Like it or not, if you are developing proprietary Linux/Windows apps and you want a toolkit, GTK2 looks pretty good, doesn't force you to reveal your stuff and is a capable, accessible toolkit.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Have you ever actually _used_ a Sun machine?
The damned things have a hardware console that is implemented as a hardware IRQ (so that every time the machine spits output to the console, the rest of the machine actually stops and waits for it to finish).
Using X is really the only way to make a Sun machine usable at the local interface.
Now, granted, you shouldn't have to administer it locally much, but you shouldn't have to put up with the disgusting Sun console any time that you do.
Using X is really the only way to make a Sun machine usable at the local interface.
I can see your users cringing every time you bring up an xterm on the local machine.
If you're running Apache/MySQL/PHP, you shouldn't need to see the console very often. Connect remotely using SSH.
I'll say it again, X has no place on a production machine. It's acceptable, but form for a development machine.
For security and stability, you should run the minumum set of tools needed to run the system. X is many wonderful things, but it is not minimal.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
macs
sgis
windows
linux
bsd
atari
amiga
look at all this duplication of effort
what a waste of time.
everyone should just use windows.
and why do we have to have 20 plus types of marsupials? can't we just have one? sure seems like a lot of duplicated effort.
or could it be that the strongest will survive?
could it be that taking the entired Gnome team and locking them in a room with the KDE team, will result in development that is no faster?
9 women can't have a baby in 1 month.
so quit worrying your pretty little head about something.
and quit posting the obvious.
how many people do we need to duplicate the message about duplicating effort?
"Can anyone remind me why Sun chose GNOME over KDE or any other desktop environment?"
;b
Sun makes a lot of money selling their hardware to the USA, UK, Candada, and Australia. Much of this hardware goes into military/intelligence systems where software controlled by companies/groups outside the English-speaking nations.
If Sun had used KDE, the desktop would tie back to a German group. Even with the source readily available, there are plenty of old guys in the English-speaking world who won't want German software near their networks. The last thing Sun needs is Microsoft FUD pushing Solaris as supporting Euro-Socialist-Anti-American stuff.
Gnome, however, has a huge amount of American work behind it. Gnome gives Sun the ability to point at companies like Ximian as the big American influences, and bring GPL software into the government world. This forces the government to admit that their systems really DO run on open-source/GPL software. BIND, Sendmail, Postfix, Apache and so on are all important apps that the infrastructures of our governments rely on, but they all stay hidden away. In the long run Gnome on Solaris 10 will help change the way the world looks at open-source and GPL software, and we will all benefit.
Unless, of course, Sun goes bankrupt first
An xterm requires less resources to start up thatn a Perl CGI script. If your users cringe when an xterm starts up, you have a seriously underpowered web server.
I don't know where this "X11 is big and slow" myth comes from. Come on, use your head. On an 8Mbyte 68k-based UNIX workstation--you know, less power than a low-end Palm--X11 was kind sluggish--around 20 years ago. Machines have gotten more than 100 times more powerful since then--running X11 isn't even noticeable.
Of course, you can make X11 big and slow by letting it allocate huge bitmaps. But that's not X11's fault--any graphics application can do that under any window system.
As for security, use "xauth" and/or only allow local connections (you can still tunnel through "ssh"): the result is pretty much bulletproof.
In these cases you should install the X virtual framebuffer only.
I cringe when developers try to dictate the COE on the production servers.
--- I do not moderate.
You could follow the link in the story and find out what Sun has to say about it -- it's in their FAQ. Basically, the key word is "network-aware".
From a what-Sun's-not-saying standpoint, I imagine it appeals to them that you can write closed-source software for GNOME without having to pay Trolltech.
> If Sun had used KDE, the desktop would tie back to
> a German group. Even with the source readily
> available, there are plenty of old guys in the
> English-speaking world who won't want German
> software near their networks. The last thing Sun
> needs is Microsoft FUD pushing Solaris as
> supporting Euro-Socialist-Anti-American stuff.
Would that be opposed to Euro-Socialist-Anti-American developed in Finland?
And since when has European being Anti-American?
Am I the only one out there who likes CDE? It seems like so many people are bashing it because it's... boring? Outdated? Ugly?
Huh?
I'm a UNIX Sys Admin, and I do 99% of my work on... drumroll... a TERMINAL WINDOW. What difference does it make if I have CDE or GNOME or whatever... I'm still using text commands to do my work. VI won't open any prettier in GNOME than CDE.
Anyone out there who actually uses Solaris for a living have a major problem with CDE?