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Java Desktop System Review
Reader writes "OSNews has the first in-depth review of Sun's Java Desktop System based on the final code. The article discusses the good (stability, Star Office 7, good Java integration) and the bad (no KDE, buggy RealTek driver, shaky Samba) and it includes a number of screenshots. It seems that Sun has put all its attention on Gnome and while this is good for cosistency across their desktop (some of their Java apps use the native GTK+ themeing), it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice."
Does anyone know where I can get a GI Joe Body Massage?
Good review, really detailed about the destkop stuff. JDS seems like a nice distro, but it still has rough edges.
Mark
Looks like someone spliced Windows XP and KDE.
I'm never the fist post!
E-Week also has a good review.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They're gonna make a comeback!
Pardon my French, here's a reason Linux fucking sucks. I should know, I work with it all the time. From the article:
/dev/hdd3 as / (a single partition for / and /boot) and used a 512 MB /swap on /dev/hdd2. I told the boot manager to get installed on /dev/hdd3 as I don't want my existing bootmanager to get nuked. Upon rebooting to go to the second part of the JDS installation, Grub will load itself and then it will give me the grub command line and it would NOT load JDS to continue with the second part of the installation. I had to reboot, go to my Mandrake 9.1 installation, mount the ReiserFS JDS hdd3 partition, create a custom LILO file and then chroot to hdd3 and use LILO as my boot manager instead of grub. I did check the /boot/grub files on JDS, everything was in order, it's just that Grub can't read that menu.lst file when it is not installed on MBR. Sun told me that this seemed like a very specific case, and it seems that it was, as I later installed JDS on my AthlonXP PC and chose the same boot manager and partition setup and indeed worked flawlessly this time.
I installed it on
Just give me OS X any day instead.
First post ya?
dear reader the gnome armageddon has started,
first of all i want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it. belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language. even if you don't care at all for gnome, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
on the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the gnome community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
many of us like the gnome desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. gnome is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of u*nix. only to name some of its advantages.
unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of gnome. the core development team somehow got the idea of targeting gnome to a complete different direction of users. the so called corporate desktop user. in other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting gnome on their computers.
having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like redhat, ximian and sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. so far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
some of the new ideas, features and implementations such as gconf, an evil windows registry like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that gnome leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. these are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
you may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved gnome desktop matured into something they didn't want. during the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the gnome mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
but the core development team of gnome don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. the reply they give is mostly the same. users should either go and 'file a bug' at bugzilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
if you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. the core development team actually don't care fo
fp?
...as in Samba de Amigo??? That dreamcast game with the maracas and stuff??
this sounds like a selling point they need to be touting a little louder.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
Sounds sort of fun, actually.
What a weird-ass system. What the heck does grafting Java images into SuSE's Yast and a bastardized Gnome 2.4/2.2 have to do with a "Java Desktop"?
Usually I wind up spilling my java all over my desktop when I read a particularly inflamatory on Slashdot...
We have seen a lot of articles here in slashdot pointing to OSNews lately, an all of them are by Eugenia Loli-Queru. Am I the only one who hates her reviews? I can't get any substance from any of the writeups.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
That Moz problem she mentioned has bugged me for a long time on every platform: the problem is that real player thinks a file with the extension .rpm is its territory. I wonder if Real will keep claiming "rpm" or give it up?
All's true that is mistrusted
sinistency / tanistency ??
right?
Isn`t Solaris a better choice than a Java+Linux system?
Seriously, I trust Solaris, and StarOffice is a nice program (but OpenOffice is better). I really don`t see a reason for this...
how long until
I keep hearing about them. Choice is good, but choice is confusing and creates incompatabilities.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Author Stephen King died suddenly is his hospital bed this morning, fighting a bad bout of pneumonia . Representatives for the Salem's Lot writer are quoted as saying the future will be "a slow healing process."
One of the screenshots in the article ( http://img.osnews.com/img/5286/jds7.png ) is a picture of a few different applications running on JDS, and I thought it was interesting that every single one of the applications in the shot rendered menus differently.
Different colors, different fonts, different metrics and text sizes, even different semantics for shortcuts (one used 'C' for ctrl, another used Ctrl, etc.)
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
The price issue.
Any other Linux operating system out there would cost you around $699 or the fear of constantly living under a lawsuit penalty, sort of like file-swappers and RIAA.
Sun is SCO-compliant, which guarantees the quality of distribution, verified applications, no Chinese backdoors and no malicious code inserted by hacker to own your system, like that sleazy Debian distribution, where anyone can get root access.
And that's a Good Thing(tm).
Now, before you flame me, that's absolutely NOT intended as a anti-KDE comment. It's simply that the Sun Java Desktop is not intended for hobbyists who are going to be installing random applications. It's intended to be used by organizations who will install it on everybody's machine (or a central server, or whatever), and that's it. Everybody's got the same stuff, and uses the same tools. Anything else is a support nightmare for a large organization, and eventually for Sun.
Java Desktop System, Page 1
/dev/hdd3 as / (a single partition for / and /boot) and used a 512 MB /swap on /dev/hdd2. I told the boot manager to get installed on /dev/hdd3 as I don't want my existing bootmanager to get nuked. Upon rebooting to go to the second part of the JDS installation, Grub will load itself and then it will give me the grub command line and it would NOT load JDS to continue with the second part of the installation. I had to reboot, go to my Mandrake 9.1 installation, mount the ReiserFS JDS hdd3 partition, create a custom LILO file and then chroot to hdd3 and use LILO as my boot manager instead of grub. I did check the /boot/grub files on JDS, everything was in order, it's just that Grub can't read that menu.lst file when it is not installed on MBR. Sun told me that this seemed like a very specific case, and it seems that it was, as I later installed JDS on my AthlonXP PC and chose the same boot manager and partition setup and indeed worked flawlessly this time.
Installation
The Build 12C comes in 6 CDs: 3 binary, 2 source and 1 documentation. The installation will be familiar to SuSE users, as it is based on Yast2 (JDS is based on SuSE Linux). Installation went fine, except for two problems:
1. I installed it on
2. After I managed to boot JDS with LILO and entered the second stage of the installation the evolution-1.4.5 and gnome-user-docs RPMs will stall on 95% forever. Changing a screen and running "top" would reveal that scrollkeeper-up was consuming 100% CPU time and it was the culprit of the stall. I had to twice manually kill scrollkeeper to get on with the rest of the installation (thankfully, both RPMs were installed successfully as I checked later). On my second installation on the AthlonXP the same two files were again stalled for a very long period of time (this time I chose to not disturb scrollkeeper), so this is a totally reproducible problem. It drags the installation time from about 45 minutes to over an hour+.
Overall I found the installation cumbersome. It is very involved (I had to go through 4-5 pref panels to configure monitor and gfx card to my liking), very time consuming (staged installations, going through unnecessary screens sometimes), it is ugly and, under some conditions as above, buggy. The best graphical installer on Linux today is Red Hat's Anaconda (with only a couple minor UI annoyances) and Sun/SuSE should learn a few things from it. Anaconda retains its power and advanced options (e.g. it has more options than Lycoris' or Lindows' installers) without alienating the new user. Yast2 on the other hand is not what I would call a "modern" installer. It is powerful, but it does not come without its share of extra carefulness the user should have as the UI is not well designed and some things are not obvious in their outcome. I hope the Ximian designers at Novell give it a complete redesign soon.
Overall, the default JDS installation takes about 2.5 GB without the dev tools (which are not installed by default).
The Good
After it manages to get installed, JDS will boot in full graphical mode and load Gnome. JDS comes with a mix of Gnome packages, some are 2.2.1, some are 2.2.2, others are even 2.4.0 (gnome-panel). The final version of JDS has a different Launch icon than the betas had, a different background image and the UI is a bit more polished.
I liked the Launch menu that Sun has put together. It is pretty functional and manageable. If you don't count the "Extras" menu which has been deprecated by Red Hat and others for being a bad usability decision, other than that, the menu is good: recent items, search for files, log out, applications, preferences on their own placeholder and Star Office 7/Mozilla 1.4/Evolution 1.4.5 are to be found in a 'quick launch' position above the Applications on the same menu.
The distro comes with most of the Gnome 2.2 applications, plus a few more: Totem
U BASTARD!! u suX0rz.
YOU FAIL IT!
*sigh*
It's like they don't even try anymore.
It that's what they can come up with, a lot more work is left to do. Wont make a dent in the windows market share in corp land...
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
Why does Sun insist on diluting the Java name? A very large percentage of non-programmers who know the term Java don't know the difference between it and JavaScript. Now they're doing it again with Java Desktop. Isn't having Microsoft trying to kill Java enough without trying to do it themselves?
Let the portage begin! I'll be really glad to see all those nice KDE apps in a native Gnome environment! Maybe with Sun, this will become a possibility.
FAILURE!
Like I said, not even trying...
Gnome is simpler, has more consistant applications, and does not have as many features. QT introduces potential licencing issues, though most of that is not important. GTK is unencumbered. For those reasons and others, Gnome is a better business decision.
You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. The corporate desktop is not a place to be giving the user thousands of applications from which to choose. Nor even alternate desktops. It's about giving them the tools they need to do the job. Locked down, so the user can't tinker with it and screw things up. Including KDE would have been a terrible choice, no matter which side of the KDE/GNOME divide you fall. Sun need to provice accessiblity. GNOME gives that, and KDE doesn't (yet). So they have to ship GNOME. So their choices are to either ship GNOME or to ship both. For the corporate market, they definitely made the right decision on that score.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
What the fuck is the deal with him? Hisonly skill seems to be making funny faces and repeating canned lines. The audience was even worse - I've never seen so many mouth breathers since Jerry Springer did a live broadcast at walmart. I guess they'd never heard of exotic spices like "salt" and "pepper"?
wondering why they decided to show a screenshot of multiple error messages?
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
If you use linux because you don't like msft, then you might want to stay away from sunw as well.
Sunw's involvement with scox has has been absolutely disgraceful. Not only has sunw been funding scox's attack on OSS, but McNealy has taken every oppertunity to squeal his silly lies about sunw having the only legal version of linux. Often, McNealy parrots McBride (scox's ceo) word for word.
I used to like sunw, but not anymore. There are plenty of other versions of linux available.
1) Take an otherwise good distro, break compatibility with the other desktop environments, integrate an interpreted programming language, and call it the Python Desktop System!
2) Get a highly-populated country (mega-points if it's communist) to have its government use your particular "distro" -- major press releases and fanfare must ensue.
3) Profit
Oh, and while you're at it, post the feature list for your other...um...proprietary *nix OS that's supposed to blow everyone away. Name it after a movie with Clooney --> Oceans11
Where did they get that theme from? Gtk2 actually looks quite nice with the standard theme. The Sun theme looks like something someone with no artistic talent created in their bedroom. The handles on the toolbars are the worst I've seen in a long time.
I'm suprised the desktop doesn't have a default Natalie Portman backdrop...
Not that there's anything wrong with submitting links to your own stories.
I have to disagree. I can see why they prefer to ship only one desktop environment for corporate use. But at least they should include Qt and the KDE libs in their core OS. It is foolish not to. It really isn't much of an overhead, and they would allow some flexibility to their users (I am talking the SysAdmins working for their clients). What if they want to deploy konqueror for file management, for instance ? Or Kdevelop as an IDE ? This is really insane, but hey, it is Sun ;-)
"N-n-n-n NO! No TIME for Dance Dance Revolution, oh but it's been so long! I cannot allow the BASTARD flooders' comments to be seen. MY DOMAIN IS SACRED!"
and
"YOU BASTARD FUCK!", Eugenia erupts in raw hatred, simultaneously ripping a 120 decibel-at-1-meter fart into the back of her chair. "Nobody is to be attack my site!" Eugenia blasts away at 10 words per minute in a barely-coherant broken English. She's on a mission. After several hours, the words on the screen are completely shattered and in disarray, they make no sense. Eugenia is impressed with her English progress and submits her lousy retort. Relaxing only for several seconds to savor the rush, she continues her patrol, sleepless into the night.
This sorta goes along with JaniceFury's comment on this article...
What's with the various shades of gray in the interface? Doesn't that make it difficult for color blind folks to use the software?
Also, why are there [at least] 5 different locations one has to go to for various preferences. And why do some preferences show up in various preferences locations? Mouse and Printers appear in two different sections. Go take a look at Windows and Mac OS and notice that ALL of the preferences / control panels are located in ONE PLACE.
One last nit to pick. What's with the various styles of icons? Some are 3D-ish some are just plane 2D, etc. It looks like there were 4 or 5 different artists making icons for various preferences / apps, with no consistency in their styles. It looks like everything was just sorta tossed together.
Gabriel Ricard
Shshhhhh dont tell anyone. What JDS *really* means is that Sun is going to be pushing GNU/Linux (aka Sun's JDS) onto tonnes of corporate desktops... further driving app development, OEM movement, driver development, etc etc etc.
I think this JDS crap is terrific, really, it means SUN is a finally a player in pushing Desktop GNU/Linux.. oh, drats, I mean JDS.
So, it's basically a RedHat derivative with a Gnome-only desktop, a flaky installer, and Java preinstalled.
Why is Sun doing this? They need a new desktop for Solaris anyway, since what they have is obsolete. But Sun has been unable to hack together a Java-based desktop. So, they took Gnome, added a JVM, and called it a "Java desktop", never mind that almost all of it is written in C. And they ship it for both Solaris and their variant of Linux because that's what they are trying to sell.
None of this is a great advance, it's an act of desparation on the part of Sun. None of the major Linux distributions rely on Java for any desktop applications; in fact, most don't even bother installing it by default. Neither does Macintosh or Windows.
Thats unconstructive critisim. I'll bet she's a person. Not everything needs to be overly technical. Personally I'm glad she takes the time to write such accessible reviews, I certainly don't have time to do it myself.
Quack, quack.
They better address this widespread concern!
Bah, who needs KDE anyway.
Funny stuff man!
too bad your ass got saaaaacked.
My last comment was marked -1 Troll, so here's my second take on this:
I don't think this distro offers anything special over a downloadable one. OK, Java is obviously going to work easier. StarOffice? It's basically Open Office with a DB app.
Ok it's for the support. When's the last time your sysadmin called Microsoft with a question about XP or Office?
Sun is known for high powered Solaris servers. They're diluting their brand by putting out a rebranded distro you can roll yourself.
An IBM distro would make more sense. We already buy IBM servers and workstations. Sun's servers won't be running the "Java Desktop System".
"I'm suprised the desktop doesn't have a default Natalie Portman backdrop..."
And we can title it "True grits".
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A_______nn_____na_________________________________ ________O
*_______aaaan_____________________________________ ________C
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First off, a review should have some sort of overview paragraph and not launch into a nit picky list of installation problems.
The reader wants to know:
1. what functionality/features are included
2. are the features/functionality any good
3. are there any problems (installation, running, etc)
4. anything else
This is from the same reviewer who blamed Fedora Core 1 for her problems compiling a new version of Gaim with the wrong packages installed.
I'd take anything said with a grain of salt.
Cheers Koz
Java is soooo 20-th century... Why whould I want it on my desktop?
In order for Linux to succeed in the corporate/home desktop environment there must be standards. This is exactly what Sun is attempting to do. Don't get me wrong, I love all the choices I have on my Linux box however the average user does not need all the extra features, programs, desktops, ect. Can you imagine if companies like HP, Gateway, or Dell released their own customized version of Windows? Yes Microsoft does allow some flexibility for the OEM's however it only goes so far. The user interface is basically the same on Win 9X-XP. This is why people stay with Windows.
[nt]
Sun's new customers will be pressuring them to integrate technologies that avoid choices that fragment the platform. Revisions to GNOME and KDE that enforce a 3-tier model will allow them to constructively coexist under the same desktop. Samba, NFS, WebDAV, TCP/IP at the data layer, feeding to Java and GNU/Linux in the business layer, with and GNOME and KDE cooperating under a unified windowing system. That kind of integration might even forgo the "desktop" metaphor, perhaps in favor of something more integrated like a dashboard. Now's the chance to steal the momentum at the human/computer interface, and Linux developers worldwide are just the people to do it.
--
make install -not war
osnews, osviews.... self promotion of crappy review sites by way of /..
i wish they had just taken Ximian's Industrial and added their own branding/colors to it. this is one of the ugliest themes i've ever seen. its kind of annoying because i think having sun pushing linux on the desktop is great, but there are going to be thousands and thousands of people who will think linux looks as klunky as that. oh well, this is a 1.0, i'm sure it will get better and more consistant with future releases
tasty electronic music vittles
No vendor is going to try to offer a solution that doesn't extend all the way to the desktop. Telling buyers they can choose their desktop environment ultimately isn't what these vendors are looking for - their buyers want out-of-the-box, and to do that you have to pick a desktop.
The KDE jabs are nearly trolls at this point. If you are a KDE user you already know how to download packages for it and switch your .xinitrc. If you can't firgure this out, get used to GNOME.
They can't print documentation or provide meaningful support if they can't even pick a desktop environment to support. Basically JDS IS GNOME. How do you repackage GNOME yet leave KDE as an option? Sounds like that means not shipping a product at all. Sun wanted to package a (meaning "one") desktop environment, that pretty much implies picking one or the other. Since KDE is basically dead from the perspective of vendor distros, it seems they made the right choice.
Well sitting in front of my spanking new Powerbook it came with Java, as most Macs always have. I know I work for a company that has a huge client base and all we do is Java.
Most windows machines came with a JVM. XP initially came with it, then didnt then didnt again. And most large manufactures who sell XP preinstalled have it on their images, the Sun JVM that is.
Java is far from dead.
And why shouldn't sun do this. Take the best of the OSS community and embrace and extend, that is what it is all about.
And solaris, does it really need a desktop?
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If you want minimal breakage, it just makes sense not to ship (and hence, support) code you don't intend to use. If people want it they can download it...but developers are not the target audience for this product.
A big part of it is that a lot of folks aren't following "platform" guidelines, or don't specifically understand how to properly use the look and feels. O'Reilly has a series of articles specifically dealing with these issues for making your Java apps "OS X" friendly (maybe someone can post a link, I can't seem to find it), but I've yet to see something in-depth and similar for GTK or Win32. It also adds another layer of code to test/maintain, and we all know developers are lazy to an extent (nor can we all afford to develop/target for many platforms), and frankly, for most of us (well, me), as long as it WORKS properly on all 3 major platforms (win, mac, linux), then I consider my job done. Look and feel considerations come last. Maybe that's a flaw in my working methodology, but it sure saves a bunch of time. Now, if I were developing for primarily OS X and not the other platforms, I'm sure my attitude would change (namely, if I ever buy a Mac).
I'm sure that the inconsistency of the appearance can be annoying (just like the plethora of Linux GUI apps that are just as inconsistent), but it certainly won't prevent me from working with the app..
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Personally, I would really like to see a desktop environtment that doesn't look, feel and act like every other desktop out there, MS included.
Someone need to come up with a new GUI look. C'mon Sun, gimme something different.
I dunno about these folks at Sun, but the "Users and Groups" icon under 'Software and Services' section reaks of chauvinistism.
Just so happens that the male has a beard and the female is blond. Why can't the guy look something like Commander Data from Star Trek and the girl be like Pam Anderson... er... Hilary Clinton??
What you are seeing is the results of the freedom and competition that exists in the Open Source market, and it's one of the reasons why Linux is going to surpass Windows.
It's the same with cars -- Hondas, Fords, Toyotas, and BMWs are similar in the terms of driver controls, yet the interiors and exteriors look very different. The buyer then chooses the one he prefers. Likewise, cereal boxes, book covers, and almost every other product imaginable, comes in a variety of packages.
Now maybe some people would prefer that there be only one car company, such as GM, which would result in a single standard appearance for cars. Likewise, Microsoft is trying to standardize the appearance of software by becoming the only major software company in existence. But I don't think that would be a good thing, for cars, or for software.
Getting back to Linux, there are a number of different toolkits that can be used to build GUI applications, including GTK, Mozilla's XPToolkit, Java's toolkit (whatever it's called), and so on. These developed independently to meet different needs at different times. For example, Gnome and other Linux developers needed an LGPL'd GUI toolkit, so they created GTK. Mozilla, on the other hand, needed a cross-platform toolkit that was friendly to C++, so they created their XPToolkit. Java, which was developed earlier, also needed their own cross-platform toolkit.
Now this may seem like a lot of duplication of effort, and it's true -- a free market does tend to take multiple paths to the same goal, especially when breaking new ground. But that competition allows multiple ideas to be explored, which results not only in better products, but also, quite often, in faster development. Of course, once one or more products have reached a good level of maturity, the motivation to start a competing project is much reduced.
So that's what you're seeing -- products that use the Java toolkit, Mozilla toolkit, GTK, Qt, and so on. Yet all those products and toolkits are able to run together on the same desktop. Competition and standards are both good things.
But Linux is about choice, so I should point out another alternative. If you are really bothered by the fact that some applications appear slightly different than others, then you might prefer to try the Red Hat or Fedora distributions. Red Hat put a lot of effort into producing a set of themes, known as BlueCurve, to give applications built with different toolkits a similar appearance.
Lastly, to give Windows its due, I should point out that Microsoft hasn't managed to kill all the competition on that platform, at least not yet. And so, you can see a similar variety of toolkits and appearances on Windows if, for example, you run MS Office, Mozilla, a Java application, RealMedia, WinAmp, and so on.
no KDE? where will we be without our thousands of apps?
oh wait, we'll use gnome and use their 1000's of apps that are just like the KDE ones.
ok, i can stop panicing now.
/. is not the newest mirror of osnews it seems...
Get off your high horse. There are plently of things to complain about her reviewing style as noted by some of the people who replied to you.
You'll excuse us if were more than a little bored with the twenty Linux distro reviews that OSNews.com puts out every week. The nit picking and subjective harping on things that many times won't even effect many users gets old real quick.
"ELQ might not be my favorite reviewer but one thing she does, and does well, is find any and all flaws in an OS."
Great. Wake me up when EVER SINGLE review stops being the same whine-fest. Just FYI there are more interesting things to hear about Linux distros then paragraph after paragraph about how a NIC didn't work. Or maybe for some odd reason you like hearing someone droning on about perceived UI issues as compared to Beos/OSX constantly?
We don't want hear glowing reviews, we just want to stop hearing the same review with only the Title switched five times a week. Maybe that means that Linux distros aren't changing enough or just maybe that means OSNews should stop visiting the same subject matter ad nauseum.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The author of this review is clearly a Linux adherent. There was no good and honest comparison with the MS desktop. The only comparisons were with other Linux desktops, and this one didn't do very well.
Why would any corporation want to subject its users to this desktop. So many inconsistencies, glitches, etc. The support costs will overwhelm any difference in price for MS apps. And there are a raft of reviews that point ot that Star Office is *still* not ready to replace MS Office, even older versions, in the Enterprise.
Reading this review, I'd advise my corporate clients (and I consult for some very large ones) to not waste the effort in even evaluating this. They'd be better off just using Slackware and the drop-line stuff to get a GNOME desktop.
I would like that very much.
I have never had a problem with KDE -- I like many KDE applications, and I want to use them.
Unfortunately, KDE only runs on the Qt platform, and I, like many others, have a problem with the Qt platform.
The problem with the Qt platform is that any commercial (I mean non-GPL) developers who use it become locked in. It's a very clever scheme on Trolltech's part, and it may be good for Trolltech, but it's not good for Linux.
Now I realize that KDE is GPL'd, and therefore is _not_ locked in by Qt (since KDE can use the GPL'd version of Qt). However, I worry that, by using KDE, I would be promoting the success of the Qt APIs, and thus encouraging the use of those APIs by commercial (non-GPL) developers, and thus helping Trolltech's lock-in scheme.
Therefore, if KDE were ported to _any other open_ platform, such as GTK, or the Mozilla XPToolkit (built with C++), then I would not only start using KDE applications myself, but I would become a big promoter for KDE, just like I am now for Gnome, Mozilla, and so on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So you know the needs of every user with perfect accuracy? Sweet? You decide who gets paid what too? Maybe for a small company, but a complicated organization can make that quite the unenviable task.
Nice thing about AD is you can force computers to install software, put the software in their way, or give them the opportunity to decide to install it as needed. Most importanty in a pretty idiot proof fashion.
If this system is targeted into corporate use, it need consistent clipboard support. Ctrl-c ctrl-v must work between all apps. Your typical Joe or Jenny Officeworker dont have patience or skill to play with X clipboard, he need easy way to copy pictures from his browser into spreadsheet, and spreadsheet into word processor.
Without this, most people will stick with their windoze boxes.
I'd name it Peacemaker.
The Smurfs got so popular because they stuck the word "smurf" in their vocabulary as much as possible. As a result they made a smurferrific amount of money smurfing every kind of merchandise smurfable.
Sun has obviously Javaed the smurfs, and wants to make a Javalicious Javatop that will make them Javatastic sums of money.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Reinstall all of your apps after a windows reinstall/reboot-fest, and one beer turns into 30!
Let's see if I got this right...
Yeah, seems to work. Besides, what some people said about the corporate desktop having to be standardised: I only know university and research surroundings, but those desktops have to individualised at least for every workgroup. Yes, it does take a lot of admin work, but the needs are just too diverse. Medics want their CT analysis programs, voice recording (and recognition), biologists have their own brand of software, physicists want Maple/Mathematica and mathematicians will kill to get their Scilab. You could try to include everything, but judging from both reviews, JDS is anything but overfeatured.
All this said, for the needs of an insurance company or some such it might be okay; but I don't see how it's better than SuSE, Redhat or Mandrake.
PS: What's wrong with the YaST installation? I like the way it's a 3-click install for newbies, but can configure everything for experts!
Divide et impera!
That's the rub.
Sun's Java desktop is going to run on all of their OSes and platforms.
So, they can sell the 'java desktop system' and when users "outgrow" Linux, they can upgrade their users to Solaris on Sparc and they'll have the same user experience.
At least that's how I see Sun's thought process... gingerly adopt and support Linux while finding ways to sell Solaris on Sparc
>"KDE and its thousands of apps choice."
>
>
Why does this sound like something an *AMIGA* user might have said way back when.........
I think the reviewer of the Sun Java Desktop is overpointing something. Of course there are some bugs, but regarding Suns always short developing resources the outcome looks quite better than it was to espect.
The other point of the critics from the reviewer goes on the 'small' scale of applications. Well there are no KDE application support in. Yes this is a point, but this is a desktop designed for the enterprise. You do not need to burn CD's on the most enterprise desktops. All of this seems to be in there, e.g. S/OOffice, Ximian Evolution, Mozilla. And it is always a good reason to limit the focus of an enterprise desktop on the usual applications.
I know SuSE Linux is available for PPC. I would be interested in seeing this run on a Macintosh, especially since Sun encourages its employees to use Macs at home.
I was just browsing freshmeat, and I came across a project called SwingWT. Now, I haven't had much time to look into the ramifications of it, but Sun really needs to do work out something like this. Combine that with something like XUL or their new Java Server Faces stuff, and some really cool stuff could appear that would bridge the gap between native, Swing, and Web.
I use both SWT and Swing together in an application, and both are great and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Swing has a nice clean API, but I absolutely hate its look and feel and it's not particularly fast. In addition, it doesn't give you enough low level control when you really need it, severely limiting its scope. Even if you can change the L&F and default colors, it's still godawful ugly by default. Lose the purple Sun, I don't care if it's your favorite corporate color. Might as well have yellow as the default theme color since it's the color of the sun.
I wouldn't touch her. Maye if she pays me but well. I wonder if her hubby gonna ride her.
Wrong.
This is for already clean systems and new installs. Grandma/n would have probably not have a pervious bootmanager installed. One hundred corporate machines though, that's a fresh install.
Your grandparents would be fine. They'd just lose all previous information.
Mom finally got a new pc. Dell with WinXP installed, no MS-Office so put on OpenOffice. She was so confused by the new interface changes from win95, a penguin-desktop wouldn't have made much difference. Make sure that she knows how to open OO, save her files, show where the solitare and simple games are.
One OS for mom, no worries on grub/lilo. Grandma is GTG.
Slashdot has totally misinterpreted Eugenia. She was never complaining that KDE was not available as a desktop environment! What she did not like was that no KDE libraries were included and the version of Qt is outdated. You may think, "Why does it matter, its a GNOME based desktop." KDE has thousands of very good applications which you have no decent GTK+ alternative for, such as K3b. apps.kde.com has a bunch of them for virtually any category if your interested. This exclusion makes it VERY difficult for one to ever sucessfully install KDE/Qt applications and installing these dependencies will automatically make you inelligeble for support.
Write the review you'd like to see. One thing I've learned in the Linux community is they appreciate people who want to help.
Quack, quack.
How about to whom are you going to speak it? or is that the point of it ...
Infuriate left and right
The original poster says that integration with the desktop (KDE) is a con with this product.
Yet MS Office is integrated with the Windows desktop, and all the Slashdot Trolls say this is a bad thing.
Several other language-specific distributions have been released in recent weeks, including the CPAN Perl Desktop, the Ansi C++ Suite, and the Pure C Distro.
C++ creator Bjorne Strausoup noted that many Linux apps are too "C-heavy" and binaries generated from C++ code would benefit from being executed in a sky-blue themed environment.
Meanwhile, Larry Wall of Perl fame pointed out that worker efficiency will be at an all-time high for users of Perl applications now that the turquoise-themed Perl distro will ensure applications point to the correct bin/ directory for perl upon installation.
The Pure C Distro dream has been thwarted by the widespread adoption of C precompilers among projects seeking to attain compatibility with the new neon pink distribution.
...since I got my Mac.
I am usually very supportive of SUN when it comes to their softwae, I like what they've done with StarOffice 7 a lot, I like the direction they are taking Java in with 1.5, but this is a brutal dissapointment.
JDS, is despite what they have said usability, and aesthetics are definitely not its strong point. Not having icons for important and marketed applications, throwing more than 5 themes at the user, and mixing so many technologies that don't mix all that well yet (Qt, GTK+) is unacceptable. Their branding is also way out of hand, it seems nowdays any software SUN makes will be branded with a dozen Java stickers regardless of what it actually is. Just looking at the screenshots I see that the start menu has a java label, nautilus has a java label, and Mozilla too, this is going overboard and it would have helped if they at least used a consistent logo.
It also seems that this is quite a bit out of date, its using GNOME 2.2.x while now the GNOME team is already hard at work on 2.6. However, I am glad at least that the applied some useful pathces like the file selector and automatic refresh patches. Also, at least it is more recent than the latest Solaris version of GNOME. In addition to being out of date they fail to include a number of essential applications such as XMMS, GAIM, a good burning application like K3b and as Eugenia mentioned, KDE/Qt libraries. As I was fearing multimedia support isn't all that great either despite their advertising, no mpeg support is just plain sad for a modern OS.
On a more positive note, while the speed isn't great, at least it is usually a stable operating system and it has a multi-billion company behind it with a name that everybody in the industry knows. I just hope that they are serious about this, their opinions on Linux throughout history have been very contradictory and as they've said they have no REAL linux strategy and are just supporting it because the market is forcing them to.
I am very displeased with SUN's offer, I hope that maybe the final version will be far better, but I doubt it to be honest. I don't know why their product ended up this way, they have used a respectable distribution, SUSE as their base and it's already been a long time, by its release it will already be severly out of date compared to Xandros, SUSE, Mandrake, and Fedora. This definitely doesen't seem like a good choice for new users and I am even skeptical about companies using it, sure they will have system administrators and professional support, but time is money and getting this up to spec sounds like it will be a pain in the arse and $100/per year is not cheap even for companies. For a first release this is still decent and I am sure it will get much better as time passes and SUN gains some good experience in the field of Linux.
On a sidenote, I admit that I like KDE more than GNOME for a number of reasons which I will not go into here, but I also like GNOME and I think its a shame that SUN isn't showing what it can really do, 2.4 is significantly better than 2.2 in terms of speed and polish.
Also, KDE needs a lot more regognition, donations, and perhaps a real corporate sponsor. Right now it is looking pretty great for GNOME in terms of money and users, with the recent adoption of JDS by the Chinese this is a major step forward for GNOME as were the wins in schools and Mexico. They are also well backed by corporate sponsors such as SUN, Ximian, Redhat, and IBM to name a few. They are getting thousands of dollars of donations, while KDE's donations are minuscule in comparrison. This is in part KDE's fault as they are against blunt begging for donations and not too aggresive or competitive on their donations page. For example GNOME's Friends program has different levels which yield small gifts, donations are tax refundable and they have a great charter and website for it all.
While GNOME deserves this, I think KDE deserves it just a much if not more, in any case they NEED it more, only about 5 developers are actually hired to work on KDE. I
"I'll take the support nightmare of users installing their own apps over the productivity nightmare of users not being able to install apps they need."
Of course you're not the guy footing the bill for either the "productivity nightmare" (persuming that one exists), or the "support nightmare" (also persumed to exist). So the call isn't yours to make.
This attitude is why geek run companies do poorly, because the tech is king, and reality isn't "cool".
Sorry--something happened during editing, so that didn't come out quite right. What I was referring to was that Macintosh doesn't rely on Java for any important desktop applications.
But, yes, the Macintosh does come preinstalled with Java. It's, in fact, probably the easiest way these days to get a machine running Java and it is well integrated with the OS.
But there are almost no Java applications for Macintosh: almost everything written for OS X seems to be written either using Cocoa and Objective-C or using Carbon (usually with some C++ wrapper).
Oy vey.
This is not about KDE vs. Gnome. This is not about the "desktop wars." This is about sane defaults. This is about _libraries._
Sun doesn't include KDE? No problem -- if Lindows wants to be KDE-only, and Sun wants to be Gnome-only, fine. These are reasonable choices for a vendor to make.[1]
The outrage here is the libraries.
THE LIBRARIES should always be included, right out of the box, on all Linux desktop systems -- both QT/KDE and GTK/Gnome, regardless of the desktop environment used. At the very least, these libraries should be seamlessly and automatically available through the packaging system (ala apt or yum) when required by newly installed software. The few people this might bother - purists, toolkit or desktop bigots - are generally skilled enough to know how to remove the offending bits themselves.
The rest of the world will appreciate the ability to run the same applications, regardless of the particular flavor of Linux they're using. This is so crucial for support within and across companies, and at the ISV level. And frankly, it's just plain sane.
C'mon, kids. The "multi-toolkit desktop" is long upon us, and it doesn't have to be any more painful for us than it is for Windows or Mac users, who happily chug along in a similar state without even knowing it. Prefer whatever framework you like, but not providing libraries for one of the major toolkits is a mistake. As JDS is SuSe-based I'm sure this can be easily remedied.
[1]: Having multiple options at the desktop environment level is great for techies, and personally I think the competition ends up bettering things for all Linux desktop users. But non-techies parse this kind of choice as meaningless, a decision between "jibberish" and "more jibberish" that should never have been placed in their laps to begin with.
holy jesus, the attention to the UI on anything but Windows if fucking appaulling.
Ummm...so what exactly is your point? My understanding of the OSS development process is that people coming and going WASN"T a disadvantage, unlike a certain OTHER process. So the facts of Eazel working or not on Gnome is irrelevent. The facts still remain that Gnome developers work on Gnome for much the same reasons KDE developers work on KDE. Being paid to work is a nice bonus, and for the sake of the "How does OSS survive?" argument is necessary to all.
There's no "noble savage coder", and neither side is better than the other, good and bad.
People who have to give presentations will almost certainly want to burn a CDR of their presentation. It's so much easier to turn up with a CDR and use whatever laptop the IT monkeys provide than making sure it gets transferred from your desktop machine onto the correct laptop, and that laptop then turns up at the presentation room (or is got to you beforehand). And don't come back with "you can always get it over the network" because the presentation might be in a hotel, somewhere well away from your company's intranet.
So, yes, while CD burning isn't a must for every desktop I would have thought a decent program would be essential somewhere in an "Enterprise" OS. (Having said that, I would also think that gcombust would be fine for everyone except the art department who will probably be using macs anyway.)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
:p
Sun has decided to support GNOME over KDE and therefore GNOME is dead, dead, dead. When is the last time that Sun supported a winner? I expect the same will sadly be true of SuSE, with the purchase by Novell.
By this logic, we will be left with RedHat, Debian and, eventually, KDE. Perhaps we will all be better off.
How many times does it have to be said???? People using this desktop won't even know what the hell KDE is. They probably won't even know what GNOME is. Why install the libs if they don't want to suport it? Its dead weight in the distro.
My company developed software for Windows and Linux using Java, the main problem with Java Debelopment is that it looks like it came out of early 1990... it just looks like crap in this day and age... sorry, if you want to convince my PHB that Java is a good idea more often, MAKE IT LOOK GOOD.
I never thought the QT toolkit, and the KDE libraries, constituted "FunGamesLinux." I'd feel pretty fucking pissed if I found I couldn't run something because some pointy-haired smartass thought I didn't need QT.
What ifthe situation was reversed? Say the desktop environment would be KDE - so they would omit GNOME and GTK+ libraries. How would YOU feel if you found out you couldn't run GAIM?
1. "it has more options than Lycoris' or Lindows' installers"
..was recompiling the kernel to support my network card. I hate 8139 card, too.
2. "...fail to see how my internal IDE IBM drive is "removable" (it can be "unmounted", but it is not "removable"), while my CD-RW is also titled "removable" (correctly) but it has a hard disk icon instead of a CD-rom icon and so it is extremely confusing..." ok, wah! Abandonwhining.com
3. "A personal request would be to add nano or pico or jed to the distro. If a new Linux user gets stuck on text mode for some reason, using vi or emacs is not really an option for most." If it is not one thing, it is the three other things...
4. "The biggest problem:"
5. " Java applications are downright ugly and out of place..." and thus is the Linux fashion show.
Another big WHATEVER from osnews.com. Keeps the insightful reviews comming.
How is it that sun manages to make gnome, one of the most beautiful desktop environments known to man, look so ugly?
Sun of all companies shouldn't be tacitly admitting that MS is the authority on windowing OS's. I mean come on... a start button, apps iconify to the bottom, they have a tray. No doubt it has the usual usability problem that when you iconify too many apps you don't have space for the titles, and only the icons end up being shown.
And after, what, 6 years of Java being the hot new thing (but cooling off lately...) they could have had a real pure Java desktop, and made it fast enough to use, too. (Around the same time, MS "standardized" today's Windows UI by making it the same in NT 4.0 as it was in Windows 95. And Sun's _just_ getting around to being the latest copycat, _now_?) What's the point of calling it Java Desktop if it's just Gnome with a Java VM available so you can run the occasional Java app (slowly and ugly), like every other Linux distro can do?
Where the hell is the innovation?
Unless I'm mistaken, they could easily burn their presentations using Nautilus.
.... instead McNeally did all he could to kill it off, and Lighthouse as well. At Sun's disposal was OO programming, PDO, Display Postscript and all sorts of other great stuff from NeXT. What was he thinking?
KDE users can install one of the best distros out there: Suse. I don't see how a distro focusing on one desktop environment is bad, especially if it's aimed at corporate customers.
Well, yes. But according to the article it's "dull" :-/
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Thats not bad! thats a damn good thing.
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
KDE on the other hand gives the administrator the Kiosk mode. You can simply lock down any user setting. Thus removing administration hassles by user changes, while at the same time keeping all the great flexibilty differnt user (groups) nees. If Sun had been smart, they would have offered a KDE desktop with a locked down default user profile.
For an explanation and tutorial of Kiosk look here.
Moritz
So, can anybody tell me why this is called a 'java desktop'? is there anything java about it? according to the review the 5 (?) included java programs are hidden away in some 'extras' menu.
Oh, yeah, the java logo is all over the place and hue.. that is about it! looking at the screenshots Java is mentioned everywhere but used nowhere, in the meantime no mention of Linux anywhere. almost as if Sun does not want people to know this is linux/gnome based.
btw: the java/gtk integration sux judging by the screenshots, as it seems to be based on gtk1.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
how in the hell is this funny... at all?