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

Tries to shy away from the debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Author Corey Liu tries to shy away from the debate over GNOME vs. KDE

That won't stop us.

Re:Tries to shy away from the debate

[BuckaBooBob]

Why Debate? Do we really want KDE or GNOME turn into the Next MS Desktop equiv?... Choice is a Good thing! I would love to see a third or fourth in the mix as well... Each Targeting a Specific target group of users so we have a Choice... One a the Evils (Sability and Security Aside) of the MS desktop is the elimination of Choice..

Re:Mirror

[musikit]

why? if sun can't handle their own servers getting /.ed then i think they need to retool their product toward the people they are trying to sell toward.

As a Solaris KDE user...

[Megaslow]

... I must say for one thing, that was probably one of the worst articles I've ever seen... A monkey could figure out how to stick the Solaris Companion CD in the drive and install KDE.

That aside, I would personally recommend not installing the sun provided KDE, but rather, the packages assembled by Stefan Teleman, available through ftp.kde.org. This is version 3.1.4, whereas the Sun provided version is 3.1.1a.

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.

Re:Stone Age

[conan_albrecht]

You miss the point of computers then... Any geek knows that half of each day must be spent on fiddling with settings to improve performance or GUI by fractions of a percent!

(Back in college, my friends used to say that I'd "accidentally" crash my computer just so I could set it up again...I think we all know this syndrome)

Re:Stone Age

[be-fan]

In the United States... You are not yet slaves to your jobs, rather, your jobs are slaves to you.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Are we living in the same United States? Americans work more and vacation less than the fucking Japanese! The Japanese!

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 ."

Don't bother with Sunfreeware's version of KDE

[illumin8]

KDE 3.x comes shipped with Solaris 8 or 9 on the Software Companion CD. I highly recommend installing all of this software, and you'll get a fully functional compiled version of KDE that is provided by Sun and supported by Sun. There is also a readme under your /opt/sfw folder that is placed there by the installer and tells you how to add KDE to your desktop selection at the Solaris login screen.

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.

solaris + kde

[chegosaurus]

I've been using the two together since kde 1.1, and it always works just fine. Now and again you might have to tweak a header file or Makefile, but usually the core and 95% of the apps work right out of the box. (Sometimes the early betas just won't build, but I can live with that.)

I'll never understand why Sun went with GNOME over KDE, cos, in terms of stability at least, that's *always* sucked on Solaris. The only shame is that you can't, at least without *major* patching, build KDE with Forte.

Well written software requires very little effort to port from Unix to Unix. It's very rare I find anything written primarily for Linux that won't build on Solaris.

This makes it very frustrating when (usually linux) people can't see further than their own OS and fail to write portable code. It's not much more work really, and people will love you for it.

Re:solaris + kde

[ajs]

The simple, flame-war-free answer is that Sun could not bear the support burden of a C++ GUI toolkit and desktop system for a platform that had two major C++ compilers (Sun's and gcc). Now that the C++ ABI is more entrenched that might not be as much of an issue, but at the time it was a key factor.

Personally, I would have gone with Gnome for other reasons. The architecture is much more open in a component sense (e.g. smaller, replacable parts). Sun has also shown that human factors were huge concern to them, and KDE suffered from having been ahead of Gnome. Sun literally got to write the book on human factors for Gnome, and that ended a LOT of debate before it got started.

I like the way Gnome has shaped up. It started with a lot of catch-up to do with respect to KDE, which was already functional when Gnome was first started. But over the years I have seen that gap narrow tremendously, and I like the Gnome code a great deal more.

Still, both are worthy of praise and use... may we have two of the three best desktops in the world for a good long time to come!

Sunfreeware's version of KDE

[IGnatius T Foobar]

It's really a shame that Sun took so long to join the party. They do this stuff better than IBM does. For all the success they've achieved, IBM's integration of various open source tools on AIX is... well... as ugly as the rest of AIX. Sun got it right and very few people seem to know about it. When you install the Software Companion CD in its entirety, a Solaris 8 or 9 box looks and quacks like a familiar Linux machine. The whole GNU toolchain is there, GNOME and KDE are both loaded, and everything acts just the way you expect it to.

IBM could learn a few things here.

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).