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KDE GUI GNOME

KDE 3.x Installation On Solaris Discussed 177

Posted by simoniker from the mooninite-os-also-popular dept.
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."
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KDE 3.x Installation On Solaris Discussed More

KDE 3.x Installation On Solaris Discussed

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  • Tries to shy away from the debate (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 29, 2003 @02:32PM (#7829462)
    Author Corey Liu tries to shy away from the debate over GNOME vs. KDE

    That won't stop us.

  • As a Solaris KDE user... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Megaslow ( 694447 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @02:38PM (#7829512) Homepage
    ... 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 [kde.org]. This is version 3.1.4, whereas the Sun provided version is 3.1.1a.

  • Stone Age (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Admiral Llama ( 2826 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @02:40PM (#7829533)
    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.
    • ...haven't gotten anything done but surf, mess with iTunes and other BS junk like that

      and we wonder why jobs are going over seas ;). thoug it does sound like a fairly normal day.
      • ...haven't gotten anything done but surf, mess with iTunes and other BS junk like that and we wonder why jobs are going over seas ;). thoug it does sound like a fairly normal day.

        Yes, funny but true. Yup, it's offtopic, but the poster makes a good point. In the United States, you are privledged to be able to do this. You are not yet slaves to your jobs, rather, your jobs are slaves to you.

        • Re:Stone Age (Score:4, Funny)

          by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @03:48PM (#7830087)
          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:Stone Age (Score:5, Funny)

      by conan_albrecht ( 446296 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @02:58PM (#7829679)
      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)
      • exactly. there was a quote by the founder of va linux on revolution OS that was pretty funny. he said something like (paraphrasing obviously) "graduate students spend all their time making their computer environment so productive that if they actually ever sat down and worked on their thesis they could finish it in one day."

    • Heh. When I'm really working on an X11 machine, I use ratpoison [sf.net]. I tell you what, it really helps you to focus entirely on the work and not get distracted ;-).

      BTW, in keeping with the subject line of this thread - did anyone else notice that in the article [sun.com], the writer talks about installing KDE3, but then supplies a screenshot referring to KDE2.2/KOffice1.1 [sun.com]? If I didn't already think it a pretty weak article, I'd find that kind of a lazy screenshot substitution mistake to be quite amusing. :-)

      Pete.

  • Hey you're messing their poll system! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    1. This page meets my need.
    2. This page was easy to find.

    I wonder how many would vote 0 and 5..

    "Thank you for your input."
  • With Novells purchase of Ximian and the founder of Gnome, could this be why Sun is now looking at KDE????

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

    LoB
    • First, to help you, it's Miguel de Icaza.

      Second, Novell also bought SuSE, which employs a lot of the KDE developers. Really, they (for the moment at least) have some control over both desktops. But keep in mind that any of those people could leave and work somewhere else, and that KDE and Gnome are open source projects, plus other companies have some interest in the direction they take. So, I really doubt that is why Sun is offering it. Actually I think they've had it on their Solaris Freeware CD for quite

  • Article in a nutshell... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Installing GNOME on Solaris: Slow and Painful.

    Installing KDE on Solaris: Slow but not so Painful.

    This coming from someone who's successfully installed
    KDE on Solaris but has yet to successfully install
    GNOME on Solaris.

  • Don't bother with Sunfreeware's version of KDE (Score:4, Informative)

    by illumin8 ( 148082 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @03:03PM (#7829713) Journal
    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.
    • The article *is* about installing the Sun supplied version of KDE which comes on the Software Companion CD. Nowhere does it mention sunfreeware.com. Also, These packages are NOT supported by Sun, which you are supposed to agree to when you install it. Sun (currently) only provides support for CDE and Gnome.

    • Sunfreeware's version of KDE (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @04:06PM (#7830264) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • When you install the Software Companion CD in its entirety, a Solaris 8 or 9 box looks and quacks like a familiar Linux machine.

        You're absolutely correct. Sun should be marketing the Software Companion CD as a benefit of using Solaris. I've heard a lot of Linux users that are new to Solaris complain about things like "where the hell is GCC?" Having the Software Companion CD installed makes any sysadmin's life about 10 times easier.
  • is there any way to get anti aliased fonts with Sun's X server? What about true type fonts? I spoose if sun's X server can use a networked font server like xfs true type would not be a problem.
    • Try here [cuddletech.com] for instructions on how to use TrueType fonts in Solaris. It's basically the same as using any other font: throw them in a directly, make a 'fonts.dir', then xset +fp .

      Anti-aliasing isn't in Xsun yet to my knowledge, though. They added Xrender support in one of the HW updates to Solaris 9 (4/03, maybe? I forget), but anti-aliasing for Xft isn't there yet, as they say vaguely here [sun.com].

      You can always use XFree86 on Solaris, though I've never tried it.

  • solaris + kde (Score:4, Informative)

    by chegosaurus ( 98703 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @03:21PM (#7829840) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs@ajs . c om> on Monday December 29, 2003 @04:05PM (#7830256) Homepage Journal
      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!
    • The only shame is that you can't, at least without *major* patching, build KDE with Forte.

      Sun have a policy that everything which ships with Solaris must be built with Forte. A major PITA for sure, but an understandable one.

      The other reason was that Sun have more engineers that know C well than C++, as far as I know.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Does any one know if there is a project to natively port KDE onto OSX?

  • I like them both (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billsf ( 34378 ) <billsf@cuba.calyx . n l> on Monday December 29, 2003 @03:29PM (#7829921) Homepage Journal
    Pick your favourite and launch it. Then launch the other inside the former. (Gnome -- launch "Gnome panel" KDE, just see if you can start a 'session' within Gnome.) While there will be some non-compatibilities, you can arrange things to where you have what you want on each. Both desktops are excellent and the best of each is certainly the best one can do.

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

  • KDE, GNOME, and CDE... (Score:2, Interesting)

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

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

    I'll give KDE a shot, but I have come to the conclusion less is better. If KDE can be locked down as quickly as FB, and is responsive, it
  • It seems that one of Sun's goals is to enter the desktop market as a serious player.Check out project looking glass [sun.com]. They mention translucent windows and 3D windowing capabilities in the whitepapers. They sure are exploring an interesting possibility there.

    Can the usability of the desktop be enhanced using a 3D window space paradigm instead of a 2D???
    • I viewed the videos up there of Looking Glass, and have to say that although it looks very nice I really can't see how it would aid productivity. So you can twist windows around the Y axis so they take up less space; so what?! If I need more space I use another desktop or iconize a few windows. Much faster to get back to them than trying to manipulate a 3D window using a 2D pointing device (mouse).

      I'm all for people researching alternatives to the Windows+Icons+Desktop paradigm, but I don't think Sun's id

  • KDE works well on Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AaronW ( 33736 ) on Monday December 29, 2003 @05:47PM (#7831055) Homepage
    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).

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