No GNOME For Solaris 9 481
Nailer writes: "Subject says it all really. A (very brief) Linuxgram article claims GNOME 2.0 won't be ready for Solaris 9 and the OS will ship with CDE and Motif as defaults. I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement the GTK port of OpenOffice has been cancelled."
Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sun, why not KDE, for the last time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, GTK is more motify.
I know this is not so... (Score:2, Interesting)
Gnome's leader Miguel de Icaza is currently having a flirtation with Microsoft's C# technologies and is producing a Linux version of the stuff under an open source initiative called the Mono Project. ?
Or could this be a hint from Sun, to ignore MS C# (and MONO)or GNOME will wither an die a slow agonising death? After all, doesn't Sun now offer an alternative to Passport, and so
Just a thought.
Re:Does anyone see a troll? (Score:1, Interesting)
But don't be fooled, it's not the developers of K/G that are perpetuating this "rift", its bored 13 year old slashdot trolls. Right now Gnome and KDE are both achiving great things, they are both making linux a contender for the desktop, and most of all, both sets of developers are working together at an increasing rate (there is a scheduled interoperablity hack-a-thon at the Linux Showcase in early november.) KDE and GNOME are both here to stay, choice is good, deal with it.
Re:Face it, GNOME is dead. (Score:2, Interesting)
However, every time you see a gnome component getting updated in sid isn't because there is something changed/new, it's just the debian developers fixing something with the package. Thats why the version will be 1.4.1-x
x being the package revision number.
All the GNOME developers seem to be busy developing for 2.0 and so they aren't working on 1.4 as much, if at all. Which is fine by me as long as I get to use 2.0 some time. Although, I wish a new version of Nautilus would come out as there is a lot of little quirks in it's behavior (especially placement of icons on the desktop).
Bonobo is very ready (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gnome will never die (Score:2, Interesting)
CDE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:no offense but... (Score:2, Interesting)
YES, the GNOME code is becoming less functional. I wasn't the biggest fan of GNOME 1.0, but it worked better for me than any subsequent release or patchwork CVS grab of GNOME. On my machines at least, every time I play with GNOME it seems *less* stable and *more* resource hungry. GNOME is definitely going in directions that I had hoped it wouldn't go in. I'm not speaking as a developer, I haven't done any GNOME development at all. I'm speaking as a prospective user who remembers when Gtk applications seemed like the *more* stable of the bunch.
A few years ago, it was a toss-up between what seemed like a resource-hungry KDE 1.x and an unstable GNOME 1.x and everyone was wondering who would end up the de-facto standard. Today, for better or for worse, there is only one free Unix desktop de-facto and that is KDE, for obvious reasons -- people are having less and less success using GNOME as a desktop in real-world environments, while KDE continues to become more and more usable by the day and memory, hard drive space and CPU power on commodity machines are cheaper than ever.
Probably I will be moderated to "-10 Anti-GNU Asshole" for saying that, but it has to be said again and again until I can accept it, and others may as well do the same. I can't give you any specific reasons why I and others sense that GNOME seems to have been its own worst enemy, but one definitely gets that feeling more and more with each checkout.
change is good, but keep offering CDE (Score:3, Interesting)
I support change, so please bring on GNOME and/or KDE and attempt to make them better. But please keep CDE and Motif for those of us that don't want the 'latest and greatest'. Patch a few of CDE's major memory leaks and I'll be a happy, content user.
Ximian Gnome on Solaris is good (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, I run Ximian Gnome on my Solaris Ultra 5 (Solaris 8) workstation (slow processor, lots of RAM). Ximian Gnome is great! For most applications, Ximian Gnome is *faster* then CDE, and it's suite of utilities is much more useful then the kruft that comes with the generic Solaris workstation install. I work in a Solaris/Windows office, and often need apps like Gnumeric/Abiword or Star Office.
Gnome on my office-workstation is not as fast as on my cheap home computer (Celeron 366, 128 Mb ram, RH 7.1), but it is perfectly usable.
Most of the slowness seems to stem from the OpenWin server + Video Card itself (slow drawing of boxes, lines, etc). Certain apps like XMMS and Mozilla are slow (but those aren't Gnome apps). Nautilus is crappy slow on Solaris, so i turned it off and use GMC.
Sun should use Java (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Sun's OS group seems blissfully disconnected from their Java side; in fact, their OS group seems stuck in the C-mindset of the traditional BSD/UNIX world. And Sun's Java group seems more focussed on Windows than on adding value to Sun's own product line. Sun's lack of coordination and their lack of in-house and open source application development in Java gives people the impression that Java isn't ready. That may have been true two years ago, but today, Java is more than up to the task of building a zippy desktop with a footprint smaller than either Gnome or KDE.
Of course, Sun can't give up completely on C/C++ toolkits, but they have that pretty well covered with Motif and its C++ wrappers, tools that are still much more widely used among Sun's customers than either Gtk+ or Qt.
Sun always seemed like Sun's worst enemy. They need a little of that Gates/Ballmer top-down coherent management and energy. McNealy barks a lot, but he doesn't seem to bite much.
Re:Sun should use Java (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't see the ten processes or so which composes a desktop each running its own JVM ANd make them threads is not a solution, IMO). When I run more than 2 or three java apps , my Sun WS starts trashing for lack of memory.
Re:Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporte (Score:3, Interesting)
But here we are talking of _Solaris_, which is not exactly an OS for 'non-technically minded people'.
Rather, the question is: would GNOME or KDE be the best desktop for the kind of people which buy and uses Sun workstations?
My personal answer is: not anymore. The 1.x versions were quite apt (especially kde, IMO, which borrowed several things from CDE). The 2.x versions (present for KDE, near future for Gnome), with their full complement of gadgets, are now much more user-desktop oriented for that (though using selected components only is still an option).
A more effective user interface for scientific and engineering workstation, IMO, could be something like Window Maker + a lightweight file manager (e.g. ROX). Or maybe XFCE, which also offer an easier transition path for CDE users (though I never liked CDE look-and-feel).
Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome? (Score:5, Interesting)
I ran around running my Linux cross-compile benchmark [mac.com] on a bunch of Sparcs. The 1G RAM, 440MHz Ultra 10 checked in with performance that was strictly worse than the 320M 450MHz iMac DV+. The 500MHz Blade 100 was around 10% better. Now, these figures are probably a tad low; I realized after the fact I was using an SMP-enabled kernel, and that adds overhead even on a single-processor machine. So credit them with another 10% until I get publish-worthy numbers. The Sparcs are still crushed by the 733MHz P3 el-cheapo Dell Optiplex, and the (badly-configured) Athlon 1200 has nothing to fear.
The Blade 1000 is a different beast. It's a real workstation, with 8M caches---can't get that in the beige box x86 world, and there are a lot of workloads that are just screaming for it. I don't have numbers yet, but I expect they'll be much more competitive. Of course, for $15-20k for a dual processor box, they'd better be.
So why buy a Blade 100?
By the way, newer kernels improved the Mac performance substantially, and SMP provided around a 60% speedup on the tests on the dual 533MHz PPC. I think I know where to borrow a dual 800MHz PowerMac, which should finally beat the crap out of the Athlon 1200. Of course, now I'm curious about dual Athlon performance, but I dunno if I really need a new machine just to run some benchmarks...
Re:Does Solaris Need Gnome? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're sending it back to your local machine, you'd have to ask what's on your desk. Well, if you're monitoring a whole bunch of Solaris boxes, it makes sense to have at least one Solaris machine on your desk, some sort of a windows machine (as it will run the software that people would be using to connect to the systems), and a few have an extra machine [linux, another solaris, or my mac, as I refuse to live without BBEdit])
Hands down, the Solaris boxes tend to be our primary machines, as you can use them for light development, they handle virtual desktops, etc. Of course, all but one of the nine folks in my office are running CDE. Does that mean that CDE's the best thing to be running? Probably not. I use it because it's here.
Would I switch to Gnome? Probably not with anything but a cold install, as I'm busy enough during the day to take the time to install without messing up my project schedule, and I'm not familiar with Gnome, so I'd have a learning curve.
I see this as being most beneficial to the folks that run linux/freebsd/openbsd at home with gnome, and have ultrasparc machines at work, and would prefer to just deal with one GUI. I don't fit into that category, but I know that I would love to get away from CDE, but I can't afford to expend significant time in switching over.
Re:That would make no commercial sense for Sun. (Score:3, Interesting)