KDE 3.x Installation On Solaris Discussed

Jim Hall writes " A recent Sun-hosted article looks at installing and running KDE 3.x on Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) -based workstations. Author Corey Liu tries to shy away from the debate over GNOME vs. KDE, and focuses on how KDE is installed on Sun workstations and the Solaris OS. Both GNOME and KDE are available at freeware Web sites for users of the Solaris OS. While Sun recently began to favor GNOME as the default desktop environment on the Solaris OS, some people still enjoy using KDE."

Comments

Stone Age

[Admiral Llama]

At work I still use AfterStep. Why? There's nothing there to fidget with instead of working. Today I'm working from home because I busted my knee and I've got Mac OS X. I haven't gotten anything done but surf, mess with iTunes and other BS junk like that.

Oh well, a coworker is still on TWM from back when it was the only choice. He's using it because everything else is bloaty. Then again, he personally owns something like 300 computers, many of which are VAX.

Novell has Degaza(sp?) the reason

[Locutus]

With Novells purchase of Ximian and the founder of Gnome, could this be why Sun is now looking at KDE????

My guess is that is also has to do with Qt and some users/businesses preference for KDE. It's good to have choice as long as they both still "play" together. IMHO.

LoB

Re:KDE

[Elektroschock]

Oh, Mosfet had a different opinion about RedHat. Many developers were very angry about RedHat that never supported KDE properly.

Bero left RedHat because of their cripple KDe policy.

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=1032946 57 505181&w=2
"Hi,
Effective immediately, I've left Red Hat (mostly in mutual agreement - I
don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they don't want an employee who
admits RH 8.0's KDE is crippleware). If anyone needs/wants to contact me, please use the addresses
bero@berolinux.org or bero@kde.org.

For any RH specific KDE issues, please contact Than Ngo ."

Re:KDE

[rRaminrodt]

Sorry, but you're only pseudo-correct. Qt has mutiple licenses, one of those is the GPL. The whole GPL, with all of its requirements, restrictions, and benefits. No more, no less.

Like any GPL source, you can sell it comercially as long as you abide by the GPL. Many OSS packages are GPL, and we use them without complaint. Not only that, those nice folks at Trolltech ;-) also give developers the option of not using the GPL: you can buy a licence that will let you do closed source development! Of course, like most closed source devel tools, doing this costs the developer money.

That's pretty much it. The developer is free to choose. Now, its not BSD or LGPL licenced, but that's the way it is. I can't figure why people scream about this (memory of the old licence situation maybe) and not about the kernel or GNU tools, those don't even give you the choice of paying for the closed option.

On the other hand, I can understand some folks being grumpy on the Windows licencing situation. But we're talking about KDE a _X11/Linux_ desktop, so I don't get where the angst comes from.

I like them both

[billsf]

Pick your favourite and launch it. Then launch the other inside the former. (Gnome -- launch "Gnome panel" KDE, just see if you can start a 'session' within Gnome.) While there will be some non-compatibilities, you can arrange things to where you have what you want on each. Both desktops are excellent and the best of each is certainly the best one can do.

Strip out any really bad incompatibilities and save the setup. You have four places to put panels alone and can ofcourse place them on top of one another. When using a platform under development this saves much of the trouble of trying to depend on one desktop alone. Ofcourse add xterm, aumix and any other applications and utilities not supplied by the desktops.

KDE, GNOME, and CDE...

[Anonymous Coward]

I run an Ultra/2 (512MB RAM) with dual 300mhz UltraSPARC procs, and most environments seem sluggish.

I have several X Terminals (mostly dated laptops) and I have found Fluxbox to be the best for thin clients as well as at the console. GNOME was responsive at the console, but on 100mbit, it felt like I was running a 386. Don't get me started with CDE, it should be banned.

I'll give KDE a shot, but I have come to the conclusion less is better. If KDE can be locked down as quickly as FB, and is responsive, it will be added to my users' list of available DE to choose from at logon.

Of course this comes from a person who doesn't really care for GNOME or KDE, no matter what OS or platform it runs on.

KDE works well on Solaris

[AaronW]

I have been running KDE on Solaris for quite some time. I wrote the ARTS Solaris sound daemon so I could listen to my ogg files. Generally I have had few problems with KDE on Solaris. The only problems I have are missing features in Sun's X implementation (i.e. no RENDER) and the huge number of additional libraries I need to compile to get everything working. I've also come across a number of nasty bugs in GCC when building KDE, but GCC 3.3.1+ seems to work fairly well.

I think the only reason Sun chose Gnome over KDE was the QT licensing issue. Other than that, KDE on Solaris rocks. It's also fairly stable.

I don't know why Sun has stuck with that god-aweful CDE for so long. CDE just plain sucks.

I've never downloaded the pre-built binaries, though. I need to control where it gets installed since it's running in a corporate environment and I feel more comfortable having compiled it myself. As it is, I usually need to patch a few files anyway for our environment.

Since I made it available, we've had many engineers switch from CDE to KDE. We had one lone GNOME user, but he switched as well (Sun's GNOME was too slow compared with KDE).