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Sun Microsystems GUI Java Programming Software

Java Desktop System Review 377

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."
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Java Desktop System Review

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  • E-Week (Score:5, Informative)

    by chill ( 34294 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:18PM (#7612129) Journal
    E-Week also has a good review [eweek.com].
    • Re:E-Week (Score:4, Informative)

      by MasterD ( 18638 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:13PM (#7612718) Journal
      Well, if you call getting many of the facts wrong good...

      • It is $50/seat if you have Sun's Enterprise server stack (not $150).
      • RedHat ships things that are not just GPL
      • GPL stands for "General Public License"
      • Re:E-Week (Score:4, Informative)

        by shemnon ( 77367 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:17PM (#7613922) Journal
        well, now it stands for "General Public Licnece." But that was after the FSF did their FUD renaming the LGPL from "Library GNU Public License" to "Lesser General Public License" and adding the Linux slander (my opinion at least) to the preamble.

        GPL more accurately referres to "GNU General Public License" and LGPL to "GNU Lesser General Public License"
  • by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06&email,com> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:19PM (#7612143)
    Sounds sort of fun, actually.
  • SuSE? Yast? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrekCycling ( 468080 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:19PM (#7612146) Homepage
    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"?

    • 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.
      • Excellent point. However, rather than mod you up and make your post more visible, I decided that would go against the whole point of Sun's sneaky campaign. So, I will quietly congratulate you on perceptivenes, and mildly chastise you for not keeping it under your hat!

        = 9J =

  • by Smelly Jeffrey ( 583520 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:19PM (#7612148) Homepage
    Usually I wind up spilling my java all over my desktop when I read a particularly inflamatory on Slashdot...
  • ELQ (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigjocker ( 113512 ) * on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:20PM (#7612156) Homepage
    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.
    • Re:ELQ (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:28PM (#7612247)
      Who cares if she can write or not?! She's a babe [osnews.com]!
    • Re:ELQ (Score:5, Informative)

      by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:36PM (#7612325) Homepage Journal
      That's cause she's the one submitting them [slashdot.org] (check at the very bottom under "accepted stories"). Yeah, she submitted it anonymously, but slashdot tries to 'hide' anonymous posts/submissions, right? As you can see, the code was poorly architected, and some 'anti-anonymizing' stuff gets through. This leads to the assumption that anonymous really isn't anonymous at all... regardless of where it happens on this site.

      Not a troll, just an observation. So much for practicing what you preach.
      • Not that there's anything wrong with submitting links to your own stories.
    • 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.
    • Re:ELQ (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ender81b ( 520454 )
      Yeah this is flamebait but what the hell, I have plenty of karma to burn..

      Why because she brings up things wrong with your precious linux distro's instead of lavishing praise all over them? She DARES to point out that something might be wrong with them? Every damm timee there's a OSnews review on slashdot people write about how much they hate ELQ largely, I think, because she tends to not write glowing reports abour their favorite distro.

      ELQ might not be my favorite reviewer but one thing she does, and do
      • Re:ELQ (Score:2, Insightful)

        by bigjocker ( 113512 ) *
        ELQ might not be my favorite reviewer but one thing she does, and does well, is find any and all flaws in an OS. THat's what makes her a good reviewer.

        One thing she really does is compare everything with BeOS and her husband's OS AtheOS.

        She reviews Linux distributions from a naive user's point of view, criticizing the complexities of the Linux world, but then (in all her reviews) a rant at the end about how she won't be able to install the latest geek toys.

        An example: The JDS is a Corporate Desktop Syst
        • Re:ELQ (Score:3, Insightful)

          by AJWM ( 19027 )
          Both of those "deficiencies" are plusses on a corporate desktop. There you do not want users installing random software apps and libraries (licensing issues aside, which are less relevant with OSS) -- it makes desktop support a nightmare.

          You also don't need CD burning software. Most of those corporate desktop machines won't even have a CD burner installed, and you don't really want most employees burning random discs at work (of what? copied commercial CDs? confidential corporate data?).

          The few employe
      • Re:ELQ (Score:3, Informative)

        by mahdi13 ( 660205 )

        ELQ might not be my favorite reviewer but one thing she does, and does well, is find any and all flaws in an OS

        She finds flaws that are the most obscure and exploits them as if they are there only for her to find exploit. Is there any mention of reading the release notes? They usually make reference to such issues...just glanced at their site, anyone know where to FIND the release notes?? Sun has always had the worst web layout...

        It's always good to read about new distros and what's good/bad with the

        • by pyros ( 61399 )
          minor thing like a specific NIC having a bug

          How minor would you consider it if your company had 500 desktops with that specific NIC? Would you shell out the cash for new NICs? Would you be happy rolling a custom built kernel? The Realtek cards are pretty well supoprted by Linux, and SuSE has had this bug for almost a year (according to the review). If Microsoft let a buggy driver sit like that people would screm bloody murder.

          I agree that she's not very good at accurately portraying the severity or impa

          • Remember that Sun is a hardware manufacturer. Meaning, if you're rolling out JDS, they're probably hoping you're rolling it out on their hardware. Also note that there is a fix for it, and if a sysadmin is rolling out 500 desktops with that specific nic, he'll have them fixed before he mirrors the drive to make dupes of, saving install time and configuration.
      • by bogie ( 31020 )
        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 u
      • Re:ELQ (Score:3, Informative)

        by batkiwi ( 137781 )
        Did you read her review of fedora?

        http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5111

        Read that, and tell me she's a competant reviewer in any way. She circumvents the entire package system then complains when things break, and doesn't read the readme that comes with the installation for flash.

        The big kicker comes in when she declares samba "broken," due to her installing it on a vmware VM that had sharing turned on, which is a known VMWARE issue (not a fedora, or linux issue at all).

        She also complains about s
    • Re:ELQ (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ChangeOnInstall ( 589099 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:04PM (#7612605)
      The major thing I mind about Eugenia's reviews is they can belittle products for things that are very obscure. And they delve into the obscure RIGHT AWAY. In this article, the obscure is introduced in the second paragraph:

      "I installed it on /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."

      For starters, if you're going to review an OS, first install it on a machine on a blank hard drive on a machine that will *ONLY* be running the tested OS, do a fairly standard install. Talk about how that works. Then try and set it up the way you like it, the way you'd use it to do your daily work. Then go see how it interoperates on a machine with 17 other test operating systems on it.

      I like the way the reviews go in depth about the OSes, I just find it annoying the way they are structured.
  • RPM downloading bug (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theatetus ( 521747 ) * on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:20PM (#7612159) Journal

    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?

  • by V. Mole ( 9567 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:24PM (#7612212) Homepage

    ...while this is good for cosistency across their desktop [...] it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice.

    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.

    • 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.
  • by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:28PM (#7612248)
    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?
    • I think the idea is that this particular desktop is focused toward using Java-based applications for Java development. Sun has created a specialized environment to further their brainchild. Now, if someone has Java experience, they have not only a set of applications which will make doing so easy, but an entire desktop. What's more, the JDS is based in Linux, making it ideal for server development, since there's plenty of *nix servers that could make use of Java applications.
    • by jeffy124 ( 453342 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:14PM (#7612725) Homepage Journal
      firstly, it was Netscape who coined the term JavaScript.

      Second - Java is well recognized for application development and deployment within the corporate environment, the target audience of the JDS product. Thus, they're going for name recognition and are probably trying to distance themselves from the Solaris name.
    • by jest3r ( 458429 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:17PM (#7612760)
      Never mind Java .. dilution is hurting Linux as a desktop ..

      There are literally 100's (possibly upwards of 1000) of different Linux distributions and flavours to choose from. (theres over 25+ distros based off of Debian alone http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros ) Its not uncommon for a Linux distros to have grand children now .. Lindows based of of Xandros based off of Debian etc.

      Once you have that figured out you need a Desktop. Between Window Managers and Desktop Environments you have over 100+ choices.
      http://www.plig.org/xwinman/index.html

      Now Sun releases something called Java Desktop which is really a Distro and a Desktop Environment combined... but never mind the Distro - they call it a Desktop. It would do Gnome and KDE good to simply release their own distros and market them as complete OS's .. considering that is what everyone else is doing anyways.

      Choice is good but its no wonder Linux seems so confusing to the average joe... maybe theres too many choices.

    • Sun wasn't responsible for calling JavaScript JavaScript. Netscape was.
    • by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @06:29PM (#7613500) Homepage
      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.

    • 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
  • Wrong market (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tet ( 2721 ) * <slashdot@nOsPam.astradyne.co.uk> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:30PM (#7612268) Homepage Journal
    it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice

    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.

    • Re:Wrong market (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMikeNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:40PM (#7612373) Journal
      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.

      You are absolutely right. A corporate desktop is a support nightmare if it isn't locked down and standardized. It would have been nice if Sun provided recent copies of the KDE toolkit, however. It is likely that some corporation is going to deicde that they need a particular KDE app, and the sysadmin will then need to figure out how to deploy the toolkit and the app to thousands of machines without breaking any dependancies.

      Please note that I am not arguing that the corporate user be able to run a KDE desktop/window manager. The corporate masters get the right to set the internal standards.

    • Re:Wrong market (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 )
      Indeed. Many people have talked about "Just one Desktop Environment" - well, here it is.

      As far as I am concerned, having just one desktop environment, just one window manager etc. is the job of the distribution, not of the developer. KDE and GNOME aren't really dividing developer effort. If the GNOME guys weren't hacking GNOME I'm not so sure they'd be busy working on KDE, and vice versa. People will work on what they want to work on.

      On the other hand, a distribution can choose to limit user choice as
  • 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.
  • Interface issues... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gabe ( 6734 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @04:43PM (#7612401) Homepage Journal
    This sorta goes along with JaniceFury's comment [slashdot.org] on this article...

    What's with the various shades of gray in the interface [osnews.com]? 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.
    • About that nit - that's part of the idea. Different apps can have different themes. I think they're just trying to demonstrate that fact; the poorly done themes are probably just placeholders of a sort.
    • What's with the various shades of gray in the interface [osnews.com]? Doesn't that make it difficult for color blind folks to use the software?

      Umm... you do realize that color blindness involves... yes, color. As in, not grays? So, no, various shades of gray don't affect people with color blindness. Now, if the windows were various shades of red and green, it's a different story.

      One last nit to pick. What's with the various styles of icons? Some are 3D-ish some are just plane 2D, etc.

      Bah... if you
      • While not having much to do with red-green color blindness, it would be a correct assumption that the varying shades of gray is awful for visually impaired people. For older folks whose eyesight is going and for visually impaired people who struggle with trying to make out the most basic details on the screen, the lousy contrast ratio of multiple grays is really going to suck.

  • 1. I installed it on /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 h
  • by nzkoz ( 139612 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:00PM (#7612567) Homepage
    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.
    • You don't like Eugenia because she doesn't mince words. When [free software] sucks, she says it does, and when it rocks, she says that as well. The problem with people like you is that you can't take criticism without automatically seeing it as a direct attack on your ideals. Not only that, but you can't understand that she writes reviews using both a user's and techie's perspective, which in my opinion is the right thing to do. This little detail is lost on all of you. If it quacks then it must be a duck,
  • by vwjeff ( 709903 )
    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 i
  • Sun's new customers [slashdot.org] 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 integ
  • With Novell grabbing Ximian, the last bastion of vendor-supported KDE distros is passing. Yes Novell may be offering lip-service for KDE but they are putting their money into GNOME. One side was destined to win backing from distro vendors, it was only a matter of time.

    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

    • Please.

      The only distribution to ever ship GNOME as the default desktop was RedHat and they have decided to back out of the consumer desktop market.

      Novell hasn't exactly made inroads because of the user-friendliness of their desktop software either; they are famous for being prolific in K12 environments and some older corporate networks that picked them before Microsoft started shouting about Active Directory. They have some really neat server-side stuff, but every single person I've talked to about their
      • Also, something else that may be interesting to some of the Slashdot crowd: the vast majority of GNOME hackers do it because they get paid to do it. If their companies stopped paying them they would stop working on GNOME. On the flipside, the vast majority of KDE developers are volunteers who do not receive a paycheck.

        The fact that at least some core GNOME coders do it for a living is a plus, not a minus. This means they won't be dropping the project when they get tired or hungry or have a kid. They are th

        • Well, it's very nice that you ignored more than half of the distros that I listed, but that's fine.

          Lindows is still one of the very few distributions that has bona-fide preloaded installations, even if they're only available on Walmart PCs.

          Xandros may not be a popular consumer desktop but they're not targeting the consumer desktop anyway.

          And re: core GNOME hackers doing it for a living - well, it is much more of a minus when their company goes under (see: Eazel) and they no longer have time or inclinatio
  • by Rinikusu ( 28164 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @05:14PM (#7612728)
    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..

  • clipboard? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by incal ( 728144 )
    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.

  • Does it take less time to install than Windows XP - Drunken Bastard Edition?

    Reinstall all of your apps after a windows reinstall/reboot-fest, and one beer turns into 30!

  • SuSE w/o KDE? Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by reignbow ( 699038 )

    Let's see if I got this right...

    1. Take SuSE, respected for its KDE, mocked for its Gnome.
    2. Make a Gnome-based distro with it
    3. Take away any support for KDE at all (some companies might actually want it, so why should we provide it?)
    4. Brutally rape all performance by using Java (don't flame - Java is cool on the net, but its not very performant, to be nice about it)
    5. make it look like Windows 3.11
    6. ?????????????????
    7. Profit?
    8. No profit!

    Yeah, seems to work. Besides, what some people said about the corporate desk

  • by fastdecade ( 179638 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:47PM (#7614138)
    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.

Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.

Working...