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Sun Mad Hatter Linux Desktop Revealed
magellan writes "Sun has released screenshots of its upcoming Mad Hatter Linux desktop. Mad Hatter includes GNOME, StarOffice, Evolution, and Mozilla. Sun has made minor modifications to Gnome to make it more familiar to Windows users. Sun's Mad Hatter, along with SuSE's new push on the desktop, could make Linux on the corporate desktop and laptop a bigger reality."
but promising! Clearly, Sun has cooped something that looks good. Let's hope they'll be a nice player and release this vor x86 as well.
Over at LinuxWorld, Sun was demonstrating the Mad Hatter desktop. However, it wasn't just Mad Hatter on a single computer, rather it was set up on dummy terminals connected to a network computer, with a login simply being a smart card inserted into a reader within the terminal. So, what's special about that?
Well, now imagine if your work (well, porn watching) was interrupted by a nosey boss (or mother). All you have to do is yank the card out, the screen locks itself and renders itself ready to other users. You can go on to another more private terminal and simply stick your card in, and presto - everything you were doing is now displayed on the new terminal. (back to porn!)
Cool stuff, but fairly much in competition with LTSP.
I always think it's great when another hardware manufacturer sees the light of open source software. But when it's coming to sun the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is saying.
Here we have Scott McNealy telling people ""Don't touch open-source software unless you have a team of intellectual-property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece" of open-source code. " yet they're also releasing an open sourced distribution of Linux.
What's the deal with Sun? One minute their CEO is in a penguin suit extolling the world starts with open source, then it's Solaris will save the world, then it's Linux is doomed because of the SCO thing, etc.
I wouldn't want to support someone so wishy washy
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I like the simplicity of it. I'm not a fan of the new XP look and feel though. 98 was a good year.
My main problems with Windows are the bugs, the licensing, and the built in limits meant to encourage home users to upgrade to their $4000 enterprise edition, which gives you comparable functionality to Linux and other free operating systems.
An OS can have a great UI (like Windows), but still be terrible in most other ways (like Windows).
Microsoft Windows is the bimbo that everyone wants to date -- great looking exterior, but nothing underneath the surface. It's it only real purpose is to fuck you over.
Linux is like the mousy looking girl who works at the library. Smart and fun as all get-out, but not necessarily as pretty as the bimbo.
Now Sun is trying to offer a library girl with bimbo good-looks. I say more power to them.
Read Suns position they are right to make it simple. Looky and feely is stupid for offices. Make it work and not have bunghole dep and debug problems. Keep it simple and functional for business they will love you! That is why MS is not selling to small business the way they want. XP, 2003, need 256meg of ram minimum or they will run like a dog on an old hp P2 or P3 slot one! Get rid of all the anime and flash and bells and whistles if you run thin clients and you want to reuse your 3-5 year old machines! Microsoft is bloatware and businesses know this. By MS trying to be Nervana for gamers, music and movies they have lost track of business big time. Sun is right on with this approach, they see the throut and they are going for it, so is IBM. Linux and freedom for the business people right on brother!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
The problem with windows was never it's gui. (Well, not for most users at least.)
At least the GUI is not the major problem with Windows. The Windows GUI is not bad, but there are a few things I dislike about the Windows GUI. For example the virtual desktops available in most Linux GUIs should have been standard in Windows by now. In an earlier comment I told about some of the reasons I like the average Linux GUI more than Windows.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
That sounds like the most "optinal" UI to me.
It's not -- it falls prey to the same issues of getting trapped that running simulated annealing without keeping things hot enough long enough runs into.
People *do* seek minima, but they will seek out local minima, not just global minima. If they're offered a feature that will make things easier and better with no cost to them, they'll take it. However, if they have the option to use something better but there is significant relearning time, they may well choose not to put out the effort.
In the case of Windows, many people know Windows. There are known issue with Windows where it does not fit with current best practices in human interface research. Take...oh, say, the use of pie menus, for instance. However, people are familiar with Windows's current linear menus, and even if there was a long-term benefit to changing to a different interface, they are going to be unhappy with the sort term cost.
I believe that the same thing is true of Linux.
How will Linux UI become "better" in the future? Why isn't these things implemented now?
The UI on Linux has been *steadily* (and compared to competitors, extremely rapidly) been improving. About twelve years ago, Linux didn't even exist. About ten years ago, you needed to be a bit of a kernel hacker to consider touching Linux. Seven years ago, a fairly serious techie experimenter, comfortable with poking around with your bootloaders. Five years ago, you had to still be a pretty decent power user, be comfortable not having a GUI for configuring much of anything, and be able to deal with lots of incompatibilities with Windows software, much less little hardware support. Four years ago, you had to be willing to deal with pretty alpha-ish, flaky or archaic desktop environment software, and still had to worry pretty constantly about hardware compatibility.
Frankly, Linux as a general user desktop environment has essentially gone from zero to threat #1 on Microsoft's worry list in the last three or four years. In some areas, UIs on Linux have surpassed their Microsoft equivalents. KDE's use of detachable panes or GNOME's complete user-configurability of keyboard menu equivalents are pretty neat. Four years ago, Linux multimedia was a pretty sad thing -- there was a commercial mpeg player called mtv and a couple of projects. Today, properly set up Linux boxes smoke Windows in latency. Microsoft has not adapted will to the tougher security requirements of an Internet-connected age, as Linux has.
Linux still has issues that keep some people from using it. A lack of entertainment software (most traditional video games do not make very good open source projects) is significant. Poor inter-distro binary and library compatibility is also an issue. If I had to ship something in binary format that I knew would run on Linux boxes, I'd probably ship it in PE format, because Wine can provide stronger guarantees about binary compatibility than Linux itself can. Linux also does not currently, IMHO, cater as well to the power-user-but-not-techie as Linux does. The light user, who uses a spreadsheet, word processor, email program, and web browser (oh, and Solitaire), has little problem with Linux other than an inability to interact with Microsoft Office file formats reliabily, and enjoys increased stability. The techie loves Linux's ability to be remotely administered, its performance, customizability, scriptability, huge (and free) suite of development tools, and availability of source to fix irritating bugs. The almost-techie-power-user, however, runs into problems. Linux has a thinner layer of GUI over the internals than does Windows. They're probably going to have to interact with the CLI. The power user may want to install unusual software, the sort of thing that doesn't come packaged, but be incapable of dealing with any problems in compiling that software.
So I believe that Linux is getting better for most desktop users much faster than Windows is, but there are definitely categories of users that will not be happy with Linux.
May we never see th
Open a terminal window in Windows to a directory. Then try to move or rename that directory (or a parent directory). An error will come up -- sharing violation. Linux will let you move the directory and simply use the new location.
Open a file, and try to move or rename that file while it's open (drives me nuts when using less in cygwin). Sharing violation. Doesn't happen in Linux.
Try running any kind of update or setup program. You generally get told to reboot. Why? Because Windows forces you to close all libraries, which means closing all programs using libraries, before they can be removed and the new versions of the libraries slapped into place. Linux uses UNIX file locking semantics, so the files can simply be deleted. They won't actually go away until the library is closed, but any new instances of programs started after an upgrade will use the new libraries. These poor file locking semantics are the reason for almost all of required Windows reboots.
I was particularly irritated when I noticed Microsoft's (IMHO dangerous and complexity-inducing) workaround for this. In XP, some MS exec realized that constant sharing violation error dialogs coming up when users tried to rename or delete files or directories containing open files or directories were pissing off users, so they ordered that this be fixed. Instead of fixing the NT kernel to be more capable, they made a workaround in XP's Explorer. From now on, failures in moving or deleting files and directories would be silent. Furthermore, to provide the user the illusion of his operation succeeding, XP's Explorer will even remove the directory's icon from any open windows. However, it is not actually deleted, and upon refreshing a window showing the directory's icon, you will notice that the icon returns.
I use about six Windows machines operating off of a single share on a regular basis. Since I frequently have consoles open in a directory (or Explorer windows open to a directory on other computers), I constantly get sharing violations. This is annoying and time-consuming, but harmless. However, Microsoft trying to play work around poor kernel design choices in Explorer is, IMHO, pretty awful.
I could also mention the poor workaround in Explorer for another NT kernel shortcoming -- the lack of support for symlinks (Shortcuts), and a host of other technical issues I have with Windows. (Remember the 8.3->long filenames issues?) The thing is that Microsoft isn't as interested in issues internal to Windows as Linus and friends do. Microsoft developers work to get a paycheck, and don't care what happens as long as end users don't see any obvious flaws. Linus is trying to produce a code showpiece, and if people can use it to help themselves out, fantastic. As a result, most Linux failings are due to the fact that developers weren't interested or motivated enough to deal with some issue that was of interest to end users but not developers, and most Microsoft issues are due to the fact that Microsoft made a customer-driven poor engineering decision in the past.
May we never see th
GPC is indeed a requisite for building OpenOffice.org for Linux (see http://tools.openoffice.org/dev_docs/build_linux.h tml#GeneratingtheBuildEnvironmentandBuildTools ) .i ndex.html, "This software is free for non-commercial use. Anyone wishing to use the gpc library in support of a commercial product please email gpc@cs.man.ac.uk." OpenOffice.org is non-commercial. It is not sold but obtainable for free from the website, http://www.openoffice.org/. But, of course, it would be more in keeping with open-source work methods if all the tools needed were open source. Thus, if you can create such a tool, or persuade the owner of GPC to open-source his tool,or point us to a satisfactory open-source equivalent, please go ahead. It seems a better strategy than to complain that OpenOffice.org is a sham.
According to the GPC site, http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/alan/software//
Louis
OpenOffice.org
Still, FVWM95 has not helped Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market even though FVWM95 has been available for at least 3 years.
However, there is good news. The vehicle that is helping Linux to penetrate the corporate desktop market is the powerful 80x86 chips by Intel and AMD. Numerous small American companies (like those in Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128) are moving en masse away from Unix workstations with crappy processors like UltraSPARC to Linux desktops with powerful processors like the Pentium 4, the Athlon, and the PPC 970.
In fact, the CEO of one company developing radio-frequency chips deploys only Linux desktops and servers. The Linux desktops are powered by Pentium 4s. To quote her, "Linux running on an 80x86 chip creates a desktop that gives 3x the performance and 1/3 the cost of a Sun workstation."
The bell tolls. It tolls ominously for Sun.
Last week in amongst the Blackout of 2003 and Blaster/Nachi worm taking down the Internet as well as the network at work, MY WINDOWS BOOT DRIVE DIED!
/proc a bit, I figured out that the USB reader gets mapped to a SCSI device. A simple:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/camera
:)
./configure, make, make install or rpm -i package.rpm isn't exactly rocket science. I typically like to compile the code myself so it's better optimized from my processor and libraries.
Not having the time or desire to replace it, I decided that I would throw my Linux box in as my primary desktop. After a few short days I am happy to report that the Linux Desktop is actually VERY usable and VERY stable.
First I needed an MP3 player capable of working with Shoutcast (streaming MP3's). RedHat decided not to include one. I headed over to source forge and picked up XMMS . XMMS is very similar to Winamp.
Once I had my tunes, it was time to get the core services working i.e. (Printing, Office Automation, and Digital Camera). Since I have an HP printer which handles postscript setting up printing was a no brainer. My color printer is an EPSON CX-5200 attached to a windows machine via USB. I know I can get connectivity via Samba, but I am not sure how the driver is going to work out. I'll tackle color printing later.
Open Office works extremely well, is compatible with MS Office and prints very nicely. For kicks, I went back to Sourceforge and downloaded and compiled the latest version of WINE and then, installed MS Office 97. My first attempt went poorly since the paper clip assistant crashes WINE. I wiped out the install and started over and minutes later I could run MS-Word and Excel under Linux. Let me repeat that, YOU CAN RUN MSOFFICE UNDER LINUX.
Next it was time for getting the pics off my digital camera. I have a USB Compact Flash reader plugged into the USB port. I stuck the compact flash card in and the harddrive blinked a bit but nothing mounted. After digging around in
mount
and VIOLA! Pictures!
Next I needed an image editor. I played around with GIMP, which is very very nice but longed for Photoshop 6.0. I tried to install Photoshop with WINE but had no luck. I googled for help and found the only way to do it was to use CrossOver Office. After downloaded and installing Cross Over Office I was able to install both Adobe Photoshop Elements V2.0 and Photoshop 6.0 . I haven't shelled out for the 7.0 upgrade yet but 7.0 supposedly works as well. Photoshop works well under WINE and I haven't had any problems except with the ALT-key. In GNOME pressing ALT and clicking in a Window is the shortcut for moving a window. You have to remap the ALT-Click to something else and I chose the WINDOWS/Logo key. I never knew this feature existed, but I find it quite useful
I was in bliss... GNOME, Photoshop, XMMS, OpenOffice, MS-Office, Ximian, and Mozilla with everything running in it's own workspace. If you haven't tried Linux as your Desktop, give it a shot. It's not as easy and point, click, install however,
Next I needed to get into work. Using SSH, I created a tunnel into work and cranked up VNC to my Windows 2000 box. VNC was running mightly slow, 40 secs for a screen update. The version of VNC that comes with RedHat 9.0 is pretty crusty so I went and obtained the new version and performance is much better (1-2 sec screen updates). Note: In VNC PRESS F8 get execute a remote CTRL-ALT-DELETE or shuffle clipboard contents.
I also used SSH to create another tunnel and used rdesktop over the tunnel to access a Windows Terminal Server. Very impressive and FAST! Between VNC and rdesktop I can access my remote deskop Windows box at work.
I haven't got any games to work yet. My favorites are Star Craft Broodwar, CIV3, and Age of Mythology. If anyone has gotte
Huh...didn't know that the NT kernel understood symlinks -- I thought it was just hard links.
I'm not an NT systems coder, so I can't respond to some of these. I don't know why you'd need kernel-level support for thread pools. I don't agree that not having an OOM killer is more advanced design. I used to think that the OOM killer was an awful hack, but I've come to feel more and more that it's a lesser-evil solution. The overwhelming majority of software, and all large software packages that I can think of, simply do not check to ensure that they can succeed on all memory allocations. In a system where you don't have an OOM killer and run out of memory, things generally simply grind slower and slower, a couple apps get failed allocations (which may lead to crashes or odd behavior later in the lifetime of the app), and fairly soon something (generally one of the worse-written apps) crashes. So, essentially, you *have* an OOM killer on NT. It's just a bit less intelligent about choosing what to kill, and can wipe out more apps. The days of classic MacOS-style fancy application-level memory management are pretty much dead, IMHO. Too much programmer work. Finally, checking malloc() results doesn't do you a damn bit of good if the allocation is a stack allocation -- what are you planning to do, other than wedge the application or kill it?
Some of the things you mentioned seem to be features that are more useful in a Windows-like environment, where there's more of a focus on threads than processes. Given that UNIX coders have thread-based models and process-based-models available these days and tend to stick with process-based-models, I feel that this is more of a Windows flaw -- that if Windows allowed a decent fork(), process pools would eliminate the need for completion ports.
Finally, I think your argument supporting NT's file locking semantics is based on a misunderstanding of how UNIX file locking works. If I have a file open, it may be deleted. However, the file is refcounted, and each hard link and each open file table entry for that file counts as a reference. So the space for that file and all of its data remains valid until the application closes it. The only guarantee NT makes that UNIX doesn't is that if an application has a file open for read, then opening it again for read will not fail to deleted -- but it *could* change for a number of other reasons, like permission modifications. So NT's semantics provide very dubious benefits, and huge problems by way of forced rebooting and killing of applications.
Finally, WRT to FILE_SHARE_DELETE (which I admit that I did not know about) -- the thing is simply not a solution to UNIX semantics. First, it only works on NT, so no programmers will use it for anything but custom apps for at least a few years. Second, as far as I can tell, it requires the process deleting the file to take abnormal action to delete the file (OpenFile() with the FILE_FLAG_DELETE_ON_CLOSE). Third, I don't believe the file is deleted until it's actually closed (no Windows box handy to test on, however). This means that if you open the thing, you cannot create a new file with the same name in the same location until the process is closed. Fourth, it requires the process opening the file to take abnormal action (pass in the special flag). Fifth, there is a huge installed base of libraries and other functions that do not allow you to pass in FILE_SHARE_DELETE. The NT object loader doesn't do so, so DLLs cannot be replaced when an application is running (which means closing apps, rebooting computer, etc). It's a good bet that many userspace libraries also do not allow you to pass in this flag. This effectively makes it useless from the user's point of view.
May we never see th