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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."
...not that Solaris is "bad"...
But who would have ever thought five years ago that the predominant commercial *NIX flavor would be adopting the GUI of it's open source competition?
Hopefully, little goodies like a Gnome Package Manager, an RPM like interface for package installation will be included or coming shortly.
Funny thing is that I am bringing a Solaris 8 box up to life as an AMPS (Apache MySQL PHP Solaris) box this week, so I guess this little gem will have to be part of the roll-out!
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.
Let me defend my last comment - I'm not a KDE or GNOME user, so I don't see one as being evil and the other as good or anything. But I do think that the duplication of effort is a sad waste of effort (I know why RMS started GNOME, and he kinda had a point, but still...)
Anyway, did Sun choose GNOME because it's more "enterprise-friendly" (ie, you can get support from Ximian)? I never heard much discussion on this point and I'm rather curious. (I'm also glad that they chose to adopt on of the main-stream Linux desktops.)
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
as much as i applaud the possibility of using gnome2 on solaris (i've been using the beta3 for a long time, and i will upgrade my sunblade workstation to the gnome2 final release), it really wouldn't work well in all possible situations...
for example:
at work we have a very large number of sunray workstations, which use a chunky 6800 as server (the largest sunray install base in europe!). we use them primarily for managing our data network (as our country's larges telco & isp).
since gnome2 uses A LOT more ram and cpu cycles than good old cde, we won't be using it anytime soon. it kind of isn't justifiable to order a 15k to use a new gui.
and then some.
a lot of the applications we use are very usable in cde (eg: alcatel/newbridge's atm node management software), so using gnome would actually make the thing less user friendly!
h357