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GNOME GUI

GNOME 2 to Replace CDE As Solaris Default DE 388

Gentu writes "OSNews had a quick chat with John Fowler, Sun Software's CTO about Solaris 10, Java, the web services competition and more. In the interview, Fowler reveals the timing in which Gnome2 will become the default desktop environment: Solaris 10, which is expected to have its first beta later in 2003. This is a huge step for Gnome2 in the UNIX world, as it will be replacing CDE for good as the default desktop environment (betas of Gnome 2 for Solaris 8/9 already exist) and becoming a standard part of the large operating environment with millions of installations worldwide. Additionally, Sun is now pushing developers on coding on either GTK+ 2.x or Java (they have in fact revealed plans on creating GTK+ bindings for Java which will make all future Solaris apps look like alike)."
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GNOME 2 to Replace CDE As Solaris Default DE

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  • It's about time! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:19AM (#4799452) Homepage Journal

    Sun has been babbling about the switch to Gnome from CDE for almost two years now. I use both KDE and Gnome, and both are far more a "desktop" than CDE ever was.

    It also confirms my decision to use GTK for GUI development under Linux (I love QT's APIs and structure under KDE, but GTK lets me port to Win32 clients without cost.)

    • I kinda have a fondness for CDE, myself. First UNIX system I was on (HP-UX at SCU) ran CDE. And those drawers made it easy to get at the apps I wanted.
    • I love QT's APIs and structure under KDE, but GTK lets me port to Win32 clients without cost

      You're joking, right? Qt 3 runs on Linux, Win32, and Mac OS X. Just look at Psi [sourceforge.net] for an example app written to Qt on Linux that works fine on all three.

      • Re:It's about time! (Score:5, Informative)

        by T-Ranger ( 10520 ) <jeffwNO@SPAMchebucto.ns.ca> on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:48AM (#4799541) Homepage
        He said without cost. QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.
        • by marm ( 144733 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @05:45AM (#4800172)

          QT costs money for other platforms. GTK is free everywhere.

          Qt works properly on other platforms. GTK+ is broken everywhere except X11 (doesn't work, or is very buggy, doesn't look like a native app).

          If you are going to recommend an alternative to Qt for cross-platform GUI development, you do yourself a great disservice by suggesting GTK+. Try wxWindows [wxwindows.org] instead - a much better alternative than GTK+, although it does still have issues.

      • "Runs" is not "free" (Score:5, Informative)

        by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:22AM (#4799643) Homepage Journal

        From the Trolltech FAQ [trolltech.com]:

        What kind of licenses exist for Qt?
        The Qt toolkit is available under two different licenses: The Professional and Enterprise Editions for commercial use on all platforms, and the Free Edition for developing free/open source software for the X11 platform.

        For those thinking to develop with the free edition, then just buy a license when they're ready to deploy:

        Can we use the Free Edition while developing our non-free application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
        No. The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software.

        The minimal price for a single platform commercial license is $1240USD. See Trolltech - Pricing Desktop [trolltech.com].

        The price is very reasonable for the functionality, but I only have so much money to spend on tools, and I'm not willing to plunk down the coin now just in case I need to be able to use my code commercially (i.e. to support a client site.)


        • For those thinking to develop with the free edition, then just buy a license when they're ready to deploy:


          Can we use the Free Edition while developing our non-free application and then purchase commercial licenses when we start to sell it?
          No. The Free Edition license applies to the development phase - anything developed without Professional or Enterprise Edition licenses must be released as free/open source software.



          Not to get to picky, but this is one of those things that I don't feel a company has a right to determine. It's not even enforcable. Prove that I developed with the Free Edition. I agree with you, there is no reason to lay the money out now, if you're not necessarily going to need to use your code commercially.

          Especially since QT is essentially just an operation system extension. Technically, it's probably perfectly legal to develop the software with the free version, sell your code to the client and tell them that it will not run without QT installed. In the same way that, for instance, Apple did in the early days with some hardware related to their video out. I can't recall the details and it's far to early to look it up, but there was some piece that was necessary that had to be sold separately to avoid unecessary cost.

    • Could be... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BrokenHalo ( 565198 )
      The move might have something to do with all those usability studies Gnome.org and Sun been carrying out having finally borne fruit. The Gnome desktop is a great UI.

      Not to start a flame war here, the fact that I personally prefer Gnome to KDE does not mean that the latter sucks (it doesn't) but the Gnome interface is very clean, smooth and consistent.

  • Gnome 2... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:22AM (#4799461) Homepage Journal
    with CDE theme? :)

    *duck*
    • Re:Gnome 2... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Slashamatic ( 553801 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:57AM (#4799725)
      Actually, that would be very useful. Solaris/CDE is seen on a lot of high-profiles desktops where training is very expensive (think traders at a bank). It would be kind of nice to be able to switch desktops on the users without them noticing.
      • Re:Gnome 2... (Score:3, Interesting)

        If you make GNOME so similar to CDE that you can switch desktops on someone without them noticing, then what have you gained? The reason Sun is switching to GNOME is because it is better (i.e. different).
    • If you want to replicate the CDE desktop, it's quite easy. I suggest you just use these [k12.il.us] on your monitor! You won't be able to tell the difference.
  • weird article? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dionysus ( 12737 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:23AM (#4799463) Homepage
    Granted, this was the first time I read osnews, but didn't the article seem weird to anyone? They hinted at an interview, but instead of quoting the person, they paraphrased the whole interview... Who knows what the Sun guy actually said, and what got interpreted by the interviewer/writer?
  • Great... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:25AM (#4799473)
    ...I bet Mozilla 1.2.1 will look great on Solaris 10.

    Hint Hint... :)

    • Mozilla 1.1 is available unofficially on Solaris 8--just download the binary from mozilla.org. Mozilla 1.2.1 should be along soon.

      Since Netscape 7 is on also Solaris, my guess is an equivalent of Mozilla 1.2.1 (Netscapeized) will come along officially from Sun also.

      I speak for myself only.

  • Woohoo? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TiMac ( 621390 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:27AM (#4799479)
    Well,

    Given how expensive Sun hardware is, I'm not sure how much of a dent this is going to make for most people. Many schools have deals with Sun, as do many corporations...but I don't know of any individuals that use a Sun box themselves.

    It would be more interesting to see a major commerical player, such as HP, begin to ship Linux systems with Gnome as the default. Gnome already has a strong geek following...what it needs now is mainstream use, which Sun is not.

    • Re:Woohoo? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mark (ph'x) ( 619499 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:55AM (#4799561)
      I have a copy here of Solaris, Intel Platform Edition. You dont need Sun hardware to run Solaris. AFAIK Solaris is also free (as in beer) for boxen with 4 or less CPUs.
      • Re:Woohoo? (Score:2, Informative)

        by fredm8 ( 33973 )
        Not quite sure how old your information is, but Solaris is now FREE (as in free beer) only for single CPU capable machines.

        Anything bigger needs a licence from Sun. Go enjoy Solaris 9 for X86 [sun.com] on a single CPU machine today
    • Re:Woohoo? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:05AM (#4799587)
      I think you fail to realize the gravity of what is going on here. GNOME is being shipped as the default desktop for the biggest player in the commercial UNIX market.

      And Sun is definitely mainstream. Maybe not if you're talking about the home PC market (Joe Dumbass Windows XP user with his shiny new Dell). However, if you're involved in any sort of scientific work or other serious applications such as oil exploration then chances are good that you're using a Sun workstation.

      What's important to note here is that a major open source project has become a key component of an OS that holds a large share of the high-end market - a market that open source and MS OS's currently lack the technical merit to enter. In other words, open source software now has credibility for high-end, serious work. An important step.
      • Re:Woohoo? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TiMac ( 621390 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:28AM (#4799658)
        GNOME is being shipped as the default desktop for the biggest player in the commercial UNIX market.

        Not to be anal retentive or a Troll or anything, but Apple is actually now the leader distributor of UNIX, with OS X. Of course there's no arguing that in it's markets, Sun is the leader of commercial UNIX, but overall...Steve Jobs slings the most *nix licenses. That's just info.

        And what I was getting at is that in the markets that Sun is aiming at, most users (geeks) know of Gnome already and its features/benefits. The only thing this is doing is making it easy to put it on the Sun machines...because it's already there! I doubt it is going to attract that many new Gnome fans. What would be bigger news, as I've already said, is if a PC with Gnome were to be targetted at "Joe Dumbass Windows XP User." Not so likely....but hey we can always dream!

      • HP handed Sun their head on a platter last quarter.

        Granted, HP did this by selling PA-RISC and Alpha. These are two dead architectures, with zero native binary compatibility with Itanium.

        HP must be pretty happy that there is a sucker born every minute.

    • by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:15AM (#4799621) Journal
      I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars. I mean, not Walmart-Lindows-cheap, but I wouldn't call that expensive.

      Especially considering that I think you can attach a "PC on a PCI card" and run a full blown x86 OS side-by-side (for what I don't know, maybe apps dev?).

      on the other hand, I don't know what to make of this constant change of GUIs. many people loathed it when Sun went with CDE from OpenWin, so they had to support both, and now switching to GNOME when finally CDE is getting reasonabbly stable and whatever (and I am actually pretty sure there are a handful of CDE zealots out there that's very vocal) so they will probabbly need to support all three from now on.

      I mean... while good news and all, just another facet of the sun indecision "Sol9 for x86, not for x86, cost $$, maybe not, go with one GUI, but wait lets change it over later." AFAIK Java has not suffered too much amid these indecisions and the specs havn't swayed that much (somebody correct me if I am bs-ing), which is thankful for.
      • by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:40AM (#4799696) Homepage Journal

        OpenWin was intended to run with DisplayPostscript, and did so very nicely. When the Unix standards wars and POSIX were ongoing, CDE was selected as the standard from various vendors contributions (components of HP's ToolTalk, Motif, etc.)

        I've never run into anyone who thought CDE was better than OpenWin, but that's what was selected as the standard, and that's what Sun provided. If they hadn't, they would have been locked out of a lot of important markets.

        It's not like there is a "constant change of GUIs" as you indicate. OpenWin was the Sun standard from about 1987 (not sure) until around 1990-1995, when CDE was spec'd. Now they're shifting to Gnome.

        Note that all the way through, applications continued to run with the different desktop managers. Or were you under the impression that different versions of apps were running for different desktop managers?

        • Note that all the way through, applications continued to run with the different desktop managers."

          And, if you wanted to use the old desktop on the new OS, you still could, it just wasn't supported by Sun anymore. The Unix GUI isn't a vital organ like say, the Windows web browser.

      • I think a brand spanking new SunBlade can be had for like 999 dollars...

        These boxes give Sun workstations a bad name and are best avoided. They're manufactured by a third party using the cheapest PC components and an UltraSPARCIIi with a tiny level 2 cache, they don't even have a real UPA - it's a fudged PC bus. The power supplies, disks and on-board ATI M64 graphics chips are all crap. The SunBlade 2000 is the first decent workstation in the product range, there's plenty of level 2 cache, decent memory bandwidth (and capacity) and fcal disks - which is no surprise, as the system board is also used in the 280R server. It's just a shame the case is so ugly :). If you're not spending your own money go for one of these.

        If you are spending your own money, 1000 dollars will buy you a decently spec'ed second hand Ultra2 or Ultra60 on ebay which will give you a much better all round experience of Sun kit, these boxes were selling for $20,000-30,000 5 years ago and if previous SPARCstations are anything to go by, will give good service for another 5-10 years.
      • by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @05:53AM (#4800191) Journal
        OK first of all, the Blade 100/150 um...sucks. I've got one on my desktop at work, and I tend to use my dual Sparc20 for everything besides websurfing. Sad but true. (and once my Ultra-2 comes in, the blade will become my blow-up box)

        And "Constant change of GUIs?" Hardly! This is the third GUI that Sun has had in their history. Also, OpenWin (a better environment than CDE from the start) has officially Not Been Supported for some time now. I think late Solaris7 releases ended support, and with Solaris8 Sun stopped shipping it. (Which isn't quite true, but don't let Sun hear me say that.)

        Sun won't have more than two environments to support, and there's really nothing to support with CDE.

        CDE was an attempt at GUI by committee, and just never worked well. It has finally become stable, but has never had the functionality or configurability (or usability!) required. Gnome has the potential to be whatever GUI you need it to be. That is a big win for selling Solaris to specific target markets.

        And in nearly 15 years of SunOS/Solaris life, I've not yet met a single CDE zealot. :-)

        My point is that this isn't indecision. It's a clear, planned progression to a modern desktop. In five years, they'll likely dump gnome for the next one, and be right in doing so. Things change.
        • Sun GUIs (Score:3, Informative)

          by dunstan ( 97493 )
          It would be the fifth - Sunview, NeWS, Openwin, CDE, Gnome.

          People tend to forget Sunview because it wasn't X based. Hell, it was kernel based, but it ran reasonably quickly on a 68020 with 4MB of memory across 10Mb ethernet. Sun took their GUI out of the kernel and into user space a few years before Microsoft took their GUI the other way. Go figure.

          The arguments about NeWS have been well rehearsed ... brilliant innovative technology but Sun kept it proprietary while X was BSD licensed.

          Then there was the Openlook vs Motif holy war, during which Scott McNeally was quoted saying Sun would adopt Motif "over my dead body".

          As for Gnome, Sun have been putting development effort into Gnome for a couple of years now, working on some of the boring bits. They wouldn't have done this if they didn't intend to use it.

          Dunstan
    • yes, woohoo.

      This is good because it is a consolidation move towards a common open source desktop for the unixes. This is good for gnome since it will increase its circulation and give it greater visibility.

      I think it all boils down to being able to tell people when you install/sell systems which run gnome that it is the same desktop that comes with Sun Workstations.

      With increased usage it will see greater improvements and more applications written for it. Which will hasten its adoption by greater numbers of people and so on. This is a good step on the road to wider adoption.
  • rocks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by painehope ( 580569 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:31AM (#4799494)
    I've been using the Gnome2 ( pre-release beta 3, IIRC ) Sun beta on an Ultra 1 in my office for quite some time, and even though the ancient graphics card only supports 8-bit graphics and 1280X1024 resolution, it rocks. hard. you can't deny the power of Motif, but as far as a solid desktop goes, GNOME has it. KDE is excellent as well, but I personally prefer GNOME.
    I just hope Red Hat and Sun don't gut each other fighting over the corporate workstation market. I am perfectly content using both platforms, both at home and at work, and would like to see both prosper. Ximian is excellent as well ( actually I'm writing this from a RedHat 7.3 boxen w/ Ximian GNOME ).
    I'm drooling at the thought of Solaris 10 right now...
    • How's the performance? Have you tried Sun's packaged GNOME 1.4 on the same box? Why do I ask?... because I tried GNOME 1.4 on an Ultra 1 as well, and it was miserably slow. I really can't imagine that 2.0 would be that much faster, maybe even a tad bit slower.

      For the record, I was using an Ultra 1/200E, 512 MB RAM, Creator3D gfx, Solaris 8 7/01 with latest patchset.

      CDE/dtwm on the same box was about as zippy as it could possibly be. Vanilla plain, but fast.
  • by deadmantalking ( 187403 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:33AM (#4799500)
    Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL?
    KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!
    But if Companies prefer GNOME, then in the long run TrollTech will see reduced demand for its product... or am i wrong?
    Of course, there is the counterargument that LGPL would ensure that TrollTech would never get any money out of QT, but i suspect that it would have fetchdd more in the long run, like it is doing for Ximian.... consulting you know!

    • As a developer, the licesnce fees for QT are cheap. Really, really cheap.

      So cheap, the cost is not an issue.

      Their fees are equivelent to 8 billable hours per developer, the're that cheap.

      • by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:00AM (#4799575) Homepage Journal

        Last time I checked (almost a year ago), QT for Win32 was several thousand dollars, a far cry from 8 billable hours. Not that the price was/is unreasonable compared to similar products (such as the now-defunct Neuron Data Open Interface, which ran around $10K/developer.)


        • Depending on discount, and what versions of your app, if can certainly vary, but for our crappy little windows app, the QT licence came out to around $1500 per developer. We bill at $200 per hour so, for us, 8 hours was about right.

          QT is so well designed that we never needed suport. It just works the way you'd expect. Really a pleasure to work with.

          After QT, there are several MFC gods around here that won't ever go back to that POS.

    • Huh? (Score:3, Flamebait)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 )
      So, are you saying that trolltech would have a lot more customers if they didn't charge any money?

      Fascinating...
    • Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL?

      Qt under the GPL has worked financially well for Troll Tech, and I see no reason why they would change. Before KDE, Troll Tech was just one of many toolkits.

      The real question is whether it was smart for KDE to pick a GPL'ed toolkit. When it comes down to it, companies like Sun and IBM really just have no interest in picking a toolkit as the basis for their desktop standard that ties them in some way to a small company somewhere. They have been down that road before and they don't want to go through that again, and neither do commercial developers, for that matter (I have been there).

      KDE might well want to consider reviving the Harmony project--an independent implementation of Qt under the LGPL. However, last they tried, Troll Tech supposedly threatened with lawsuits.

      KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!

      Maybe it's Windows "done right", but from a technical point of view, I can't get particularly excited about either Gtk+ or Qt. Neither of them are very well interfaced with X11 in my opinion, and the APIs are quite cumbersome, too. My view is that, since I think both are pretty mediocre, I might as well use the one that comes with fewer strings attached. In fact, I tend to use wxWindows and FLTK most these days--they are less political, tend to be simpler, have lots of language bindings, and have even fewer strings attached.

      • KDE picked the then QPL'd QT which didn't allow redistribution of the qt source, but you could modify it and release source patches for it. It was only later that Troll Tech decided to dual license qt to gain more open source credibility for KDE. This meant more users, which meant more potential customers of commercial qt licenses. LGPL would be out of the question, it would allow anyone to port qt to, say win32 allowing commercial apps to use that port instead of Troll Techs official port without paying for a commercially licensed qt. Troll Tech would stand to lose it all if qt were LGPL.
        • It seems like we agree completely: GPL/QPL works for Troll Tech, so they are not going to change it. And, given the choice, Sun and other UNIX vendors naturally prefer a C-based LGPL toolkit to a C++-based GPL/QPL toolkit.

          That still leaves the question: what is the KDE project's response going to be, if any?

    • Not a troll, but does anyone else feel that strategically, TrollTech should have made QT LGPL? KDE is much more tightly done than GNOME and the overall effect is defnly smoother, kinda like Windows done right!

      Not a troll either, but an opposing point of view. If you'd been comparing Gnome 1.4 with KDE3 then yeah, I'd agree, but I'm using gnome2 on both my desktop machines and it definately feels smoother, slicker, more professionally done than KDE IMHO. The usability efforts Sun has been putting in really, really show through. It's light on features at this time compared to KDE, and some parts of KDE are undeniably better, but to me Gnome2 just hangs together better.

      What also surprised me was that once I threw off my preconceptions and started digging into the developer platform, I discovered it was really nice. I grew up on objects, so the idea of everything being written in C kind of seemed rather dumb to me, but as I talked to people the reasons became clear. I'd also assumed Bonobo was horribly complex, unwieldy and slow. All those preconceptions turned out to be false. GTK2 is a really nice toolkit actually, with excellent C++ bindings if you want to use that language.

      Of course, it'd help if their developer documentation didn't suck so much, then I'd simply have been able to read proper material and probably wouldn't have got these preconceptions in the first place.

    • You have to remember that TrollTech still makes a lot of money off of the licenses it sells under Windows. Why shouldn't they? It's a great, intuitive API. Besides, they don't restrict OSS/partially-Free software from running under Windows. You can still use the non-commercial license for it.
    • The problem wouldn't have been that Sun would have had to pay license fees to TrollTech, as someone said, they're not that much.
      I think the problem is that ISV's writing applications for Solaris/KDE/QT, would also have been forced to pay license fees to TrollTech.
      This is from the QT lisencing page:

      Re-licensing note: The standard Qt license does not permit distribution of Qt-based software which allow non-licensed end users to create programs that use Qt.

      Maybe Sun could've negotiated a special license with QT (maybe they tried and it didn't work out, who knowns...). I guess it was just easier to use Gtk+.
    • It actually has no importance at all to KDE.

      KDE is the leading linux Desktop worldwide and only Redhat's stubbornness has kept GNOME alive in the USA. KDE-3.1 will be released today or tomorrow and it is much more advanced than any other Desktop I have tried including GNOME-2, which is very hard to customize. All desktop distributions except for Redhat default to KDE.

      Do you really think that just because GNOME is used on all new Solaris company Desktops, a single KDE linux user will switch to GNOME? Seriously, how many people use Solaris on a Desktop? 10000? Maybe? How many of these people will contribute to free software?

      KDE is GPL software, just like linux and QT is GPL software just like linux. Maybe we should relicense the kernel to LGPL so that Sun, MS and IBM can use it better?
      Don't you notice how ridiculous this is?
  • by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @01:34AM (#4799504) Homepage Journal

    The initial write up seemed to suggest that this will be a first for interfacing Java and the GNOME-related libs. This is not [sourceforge.net] so [sourceforge.net]. (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects... Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.) There may be other similar projects out there, that's just what I turned up with a few minutes' search on freshmeat and sourceforge.

    Bravo to Sun, though, for making the decision to commit to GNOME. CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO. Even OpenWindows had some degree of retro charm about it, CDE just looked like what happens if you let Soviet housing block architects design a GUI. Feh!

    • by ianezz ( 31449 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:21AM (#4799639) Homepage
      Admittedly, you're giving up portability but Java is nice, or at least interesting, for many other reasons.

      I wonder if this commitment to Gnome from Sun could also be considered some sort of admission that Swing, despite years of research and development, is not (yet?) that adeguate to make a desktop environment.

      But then, Sun people probably just didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

      • Actually Swing is quite adequate for desktop applications, and some very complex desktop applications have been written using Swing (such as Netbeans [netbeans.org]). The main problem with Swing is that if anything, it's *too* complex and tends to run visibly slow on anything less than a 1GHz machine.

        I think Swing's sluggishness has been a detriment to Java. Recent model JVM's with JIT compilation are quite fast at executing Java code, but people who use a Swing app on a slow machine will say Java is slow when what they really mean is Swing is slow.
        • Fortunately, even if they are saying Java is slow because Swing is slow they're still right, if for the wrong reasons... Java IS slow. Regardless of the JVM, native code is faster. However, I'm not saying that Java is bad. I used to loathe it, but for the xx% of the time when speed is not a major issue, Java is a valid choice.
          • Java runs nearly as fast as compiled code for most things.

            In these days of 2Ghz cpus on $700 computers, bitching about performance on your 6-year old PC is really not realistic.

            Think of XML. XML adds massive overhead to applications in terms of data stored. But when you analyze everything in the end, the benefits of using it outweigh the overhead in diskspace, processor time for parsing and network load.
      • I wonder if this commitment to Gnome from Sun could also be considered some sort of admission that Swing, despite years of research and development, is not (yet?) that adeguate to make a desktop environment.

        <micro-flame>
        Sun has never given it a serious try: the X11 implementation for Java 2D, AWT, and Swing is absolutely awful. Sun keeps pointing the finger at X11, but it comes down to that they just don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes to X11. I think their engineers must still be mourning the (deserved) demise of NeWS and SunView. The latest idiocy is that instead of aggressively deploying the X11 RENDER extension, which would give them the Java2D imaging model, Sun has made noises about building a DRI-based renderer for Java on X11. Sorry, did I mention that Sun's sorry treatment of X11 really annoys me?
        </micro-flame>

        Basically, anybody who tries to build a Windows/Mac/X11 cross-platform toolkit will do a poor job on X11. The capabilities of the X11 server just differ too much from the APIs on other platforms. Unfortunately, all major X11 toolkits these days (including Gtk+) fail to take full advantage of X11. However, some toolkits are better than others, and Gtk+ is a compromise one can live with.

        The way to build a really good Java toolkit for X11 would be to start with a pure Java X11 binding (like Escher) and build a dedicated toolkit on top of that.

    • GTK has been ported to windows, and of course native Java compilers exist on windows (perhaps even gcj, don't know). The Java-GTK bindings haven't yet been ported to win32, but that's the only piece that would have to be done in order to write cross-platform native Java/GTK apps. Mac OS/X probably wouldn't be too hard to add either.

      I currently use Swing for GUI Java apps because it's cross platform with minimal headaches, but Swing is a slow pig on anything less than a 1GHz machine. Unfortunately I don't think there is anyone working on it right now, but It'd be great to dump Swing for GTK once these bindings get ported.

    • Or perhaps people have forgotten about the Eclipse [eclipse.org] Project. Cross platform with native GUI bindings including win32, GTK, and Motif (ack!). I've worked with it a little and it is definitely a departure from swing; having to actually free graphic resources feels odd after having it done automagically for you for so long.
    • (In fact, with gcj you're able to write native-binary GNOME apps using Java and the above projects...

      gcj implements most of the Java programming language, but it only has a tiny fraction of the Java libraries.

      There is currently only one Java platform implementation, and it is proprietary and comes from Sun; several other companies have licensed it and are shipping modified versions.

      CDE is an ugly pain in the ass, IMHO.

      CDE is basically what was considered fashionable around the time of Windows 3.1 and OS/2. Also, while the bindings may seem strange to people who have grown up on Windows or WindowMaker or whatever, CDE is actually pretty consistent.

      I'm kind of conflicted about CDE/Motif. The actual implementation of Motif sucks badly and is quite buggy. But Motif takes much better advantage of X11 than Gtk+, and technically, CDE does quite a number of things a lot better than Gnome.

  • by guacamole ( 24270 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:14AM (#4799616)
    The rumors that tons of freeware software and even Gnome might be integrated into Solaris started floating around even before Solaris 8 release. After Solaris 8 release, Sun has made several official statements promissing to include the Gnome desktop in Solaris 9. Solaris 9 has been released in May and it still does not include the Gnome desktop. The last rumor I have heard, was that Solaris 9 12/02 (which was supposed to be released this month) will include it. However, I haven't heard a confmation of that rumor in a long time and now this. They're asking us to wait until Solaris 10 release, damn you Sun.

    And no, an unsupported add-on beta package is not good enough. I want it to be integrated with Solaris and supported by Sun, just like any other Solaris package (this includes fixing bugs and providing patches as part of Solaris patch clusters).

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • free stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 )

        It's funny.

        I'm running KDE on Linux on dual 2.2GHz Pentium 4s with an nVidia card. It's great.

        But I've used Sun workstations from (Sun 3/160) 1985-2001 (Ultra2).

        When OpenWindows started to ship with XView and then with CDE, I moved over to use plain old twm, then ctwm and finally fvwm. Avoided CDE all these years. It's only now under Linux that I've conceded to using one of these full-featured desktops because it doesn't feel heavy.

        Desktop UNIX is going free and Sun will be wise to change to the times.

        Sun still rules in the big server arena, but it could leverage that in making a name for itself in the newly emerging low cost UNIX desktop area, as long as it doesn't get caught up misty-eyed pining for the times when people were willing to shell out $20K for a workstation. Enterprise level integration and management of UNIX LANs running StarOffice, Mozilla and Evolution is a potentially huge market playing to Sun's traditional strengths. (NFS, NIS, etc.)

        If Sun doesn't, then we'll have to look to other players that may not be quite as well positioned from some perspectives: HP, IBM, Red Hat, Dell...

    • Actually, instead of
      "GNOME 2 to Replace CDE As Solaris Default DESKTOP"
      the heading shoud be:
      "finally GNOME 2 is not going into Solaris 9"
    • Solaris 8 (from 01/01, I think) and 9 have included Gnome 1.4 on the companion CD, and if you have a support contract, they'll support it.

      Unfortunately, Gnome 1.4 on Solaris was/is such utter shite that you'd be crazy to even try using it. The 2.0 Beta1 was more stable than 1.4 release!

      So how about a 2.0 final release pkg with support, but not integrated into the install CDs? I think we could see that happening either this month or next.

      This 'announcement' (hardly even that) was regarding G2.0 becoming the _default_ desktop. No big deal.
  • I hope they join up with the Gtk# [sf.net] team if they want to create Java Gtk+ bindings. Gtk# has a very complete platform for parsing Gtk+'s GLib structure to generate OO bindings which could be easily modified to output Java code.

    But then again, Sun probably don't want to acknowledge the existence of C#. It'd be sad if politics got in the way and caused a duplication of effort -- there really isn't any reason why Sun should have to start the project from scratch, it's a very large undertaking.
  • by mr_tenor ( 310787 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:29AM (#4799659)
    Will they finally flesh out the woefully inadequate GTK+ documentation?

    One of the biggest problems I've found when developin free software is I'll think "Ooo... this toolkit/framework has the features I need" (happened with GTK+ about a year ago) and then it'll take a month to find documentation or guides about it or figure it out from scratch myself.

    It's been said heaps before, but developer documentation for Windows stuff comes by the bucketload and there's less different things to document. Of course, the ever-changing nature of free software APIs may have something to do with it...
    • One of the biggest problems I've found when developin free software is I'll think "Ooo... this toolkit/framework has the features I need" (happened with GTK+ about a year ago) and then it'll take a month to find documentation or guides about it or figure it out from scratch myself.

      So use Qt rather than GTK+ then. ;)

      Seriously, the Qt documentation is superb. Complete, comprehensive, up-to-date, easy to read and navigate, and with a very good set of tutorials that range from a simple 'Hello World' app through to a full-blown game and a charting app. It's excellent even by Windows standards - but then, it has to be, because it gets sold with that documentation on Windows. Check it out here. [trolltech.com]

      Don't assume that simply because some X toolkits have poor documentation (and unfortunately GTK+ is one of the poorer examples) that all of them do.

  • Wow! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Newer Guy ( 520108 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:30AM (#4799664)
    This is a big boost for Gnome...and it's been needing the boost since KDE is coming on so strong. Unless of course, Sun screws things up...which is entirely possible. My big concern with the dueling desktops is that for uniformity's sake there really should be only one standard desktop.
  • by Maul ( 83993 )
    CDE sucks, it is good that a better WM is making it to Solaris, finally. Even though I use KDE, Gnome will be a welcome change for everyone, I think.
    • Ignoring the Window Manager/desktop slip there, there always was a better desktop for Solaris. OpenWindows. Unfortunately, it's officially dead now, so we have to recreate one.
  • by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @03:07AM (#4799752)
    If Mono, Gtk#, and Gnome2 keep going the way they are going, Sun may be shipping a .NET-based desktop before Microsoft is :-)
  • I could have sworn I saw that "CDE is dead" troll around here...

    Oh, I guess his mommy took the computer away for a few months.

  • by ahornby ( 1734 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @05:26AM (#4800108) Homepage
    Linux won't be able to ship with Java/Gtk by default until Sun open source the jdk.

    If they don't do anything you will have the weird situation of Red Hat 9.x shipping with a .NET environment (from mono), but not a Java environment.

    I know about gcj etc, but to be able to run Apache Tomcat you really need a Sun derived JDK.
  • by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @05:58AM (#4800204)
    Whenever SUN and GNOME is brought up, there are always someone suggesting they should have used KDE instead. I'm a GNOME-user and I do not want to get into a discussion about quality here, so lets assumed that the (biased) assumption that KDE is better than GNOME is correct.*

    The main issue is control. GTK+ and most GNOME-libraries are based on a LGPL-license, while Qt is based on GPL. This is all fine and dandy for free software, and this is certainly not a question of morality. Qt is free software.

    For closed source development however things look different. For GTK+/GNOME you can develop closed apps without problems, with Qt/KDE you have to obtain a license from Trolltech. This could be fine for SUN themselves, but:

    SUN would not like to be held totally at ransom by Trolltech for all third-party developers. If Trolltech wanted to, they could cease giving out commercial licenses for the SUN Solaris platform at ANY TIME. Do you think any OS-developer would be boneheaded enough to let someone else control the platform? Do you think Microsoft would form the next Windows using Qt?`

    The question for SUN is:
    "Do we use a platform that is in direct control by another company for third-party development, or do we use a platform that is not?"

    This is an easy question to answer wether or not you like KDE or GNOME better.

    (*) It might be. I like GNOME better, but this might be my biased opinion. I just wanted to state that this was irrelevant.
  • This message might not get any replies, being down at the bottom of the stack, but it's worth a shot...

    What has CDE been like over the past year? I keep hearing folks talk about how mature/stable/etc it has become. I first used CDE under Solaris 2.6, and later on Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 (revision 07/01). I never had much of a problem with it... it did the job and had a clean look to it. BUT...

    ...my big beef with it was the blasted memory leaks. All three versions I tried would gobble up insane amounts of ram over about a month's time. Logging out at night solved the problem, but was a bit of a pain on non-networked, always-logged-in boxes. I was used to Openwin as well as SGI's "IndigoMagic" desktop, both of which could run logged-in for months without sucking up more than an extra mb or so of ram. I guess maybe CDE's developers felt the average user would logout after a day or two... or reboot every day like the Wintel PC crowd. I dunno. *shrug*

    My long term solution was to ditch CDE on my own box and just use mwm as my wm and have a nicely configured "right-click" root menu. xterm and xwsh are my program launchers, damnit! :)
  • by embobo ( 1520 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @12:05PM (#4802445) Homepage

    I despise CDE. Not for its obtuse configuration scheme, but rather for the fact that it has so many security holes. ToolTalk especially is the bane of my existence. Take a look at what CERT has to say about CDE [cert.org]. Whoever coded CDE should be fired.

  • Say What?! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArtDent ( 83554 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @02:59PM (#4804080)

    I know this isn't the point that the submitter chose to focus on, but I have to point out the anti-IBM spin that the OSNews author let through or inserted:

    OSNews was also told that Sun will not commit Solaris code to the Linux kernel (Solaris is known to have one of the best, if not the best, SMP scalability in the industry with the only real competition coming from HP-UX and IRIX).

    The omission of AIX on POWER4 is completely bogus. IBM is Sun's only real competition right now, and Big Blue's offerings outperform Solaris on Sparc at a fraction of the cost.

    Sun might write some drivers if needed and do some bug fixes, but will not be directly involved in the process of steering the Linux kernel. "Linus Torvalds and the community are doing a fine job on it. Sun will not attempt to hijack the open nature of the Linux kernel in any proprietary direction," said Moffitt. Distinguishing Sun's Linux policy with IBM's, is important to Moffitt.

    I'm sorry, but who really thinks that it's a bad thing that IBM is paying a large number of developers to contribute GPL'ed code to the Linux kernel? IBM's work has had a lot to do with the high-end progress that we've seen in 2.4 and will see in 2.6. They're not steering the kernel and they're not subverting the process, they're just submitting their patches like anyone else could. They're adding their efforts to the efforts of others in the community, and everyone is benefiting from the results.

    Sun, on the other hand, is willing to make the massive contribution of writing some drivers, if no one else will do it form them. Otherwise, they're satisfied to offer Linux, only as a low-end player, and do their darndest to make sure it stays that way.

    It's false that IBM is "not evolving AIX" anymore -- their last release was less than 2 months ago. But their actions clearly show that they want to help Linux grow into the role that AIX currently fills (to be clear, that would be running on pSeries machines to outperform Solaris on Sparc). Obviously, Sun has a problem with that, but why should anybody else?

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