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Gnome 2.0 Officially Available For Solaris

Posted by chrisd on from the gnome-without-hairy-toes dept.

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."

9 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. 2.0? Why, oh why? by Furry+Ice · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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_.

  2. Good to see by fault0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Good to see by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I know many Sun users who liked CDE because it was stable as a rock.

      Gnome 2.2 is great, but it's not stable. I used Gnome1.2 and 1.4 (Vanilla and Ximian) on a Sun workstation for almost 2 years, and was really annoyed by stability and memory leakage.

      Sun really shouldn't release Gnome2.2 until it's gone through a trial-testing period, and after several patches have been released.

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
  3. what took them so long by softwave · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 Frankly I think CDE was getting a little bit outdated.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 ;)

  4. Re:Sun and GNOME by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because Sun didn't want to pay royalties for proprietary non-open applications they developed against KDE, perhaps?

  5. Re:Sun and GNOME by tjwhaynes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Nice New Face...Same Old Solaris by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
  7. don't be ridiculous by g4dget · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I can see your users cringing every time you bring up an xterm on the local machine.

    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.

  8. Am I alone? by GS11_Pus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?