KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.
I’ve been using Unix, Linux, MacOS, Windows for years and still believe Linux will NOT be accepted on the desktop until it is simplified. Having the ability to customize every detail of every widget is fine for a geek, but not for the general public. People just want to check email, surf, install apps, save their pictures of Grandma at the Grand Canyon, etc.
Until you can drag an application to an applications folder in Linux and have it fully installed without complaining about thisLib and thatLib which is incompatible with version 3.2.2.1-01 of whateverLib, no one will give a F@$% about linux on their desktop.
Technically inclined people always argue that you can do all of these things with Linux (and I agree), but until linux acts like what the general public expects it to act like, it is doomed on the desktop, especially when it has to compete with desktops like OSX.
You’re right Anonymous. And by that logic, Windows isn’t ready either!
You can check your email, surf, install apps, and save pictures of your Grandma just fine in Linux. But you’re just trolling
What are you talking about?! This is an article about getting a desktop environment on Solaris.
Where did Linux come into this?!
As for your method of installing an application: well first off, how many people know about drag and drop? The easiest is double-clicking on a package to start a process that will install the application. Most Linux distros support that already, although they could dress it up a little more nicely. Microsoft does too. Even Solaris has it’s own packing system, though it’s not often used.
OpenSolaris, will it boot on the new Intel-Macs when they come out. Any speculation?
It would be cool, just brings a lot more to the Mac now.
spaceboy29
Given the Mactels will run Windows, it probably won’t be hard to make OpenSolaris run on them either. A little bit of driver work, I suppose.
The gnome developers should be taken note of this. Once more kde gets first to a new platform. As I have said in NetBSD related topics, kde's portability is showing its good design with every new port.
I wouldn’t say its portability, but rather buildability. KDE is absolutely trivial to build from SVN because there’s only about 5 things you have to check out and build in order. Gnome on the other hand took the route of reuse as much stuff as possible and so you need scripts that automagically download and build everything in the right order.
Portability also plays a bit of a part here as well. As for as I know, there are no non-X ports of GNOME. There are native KDE ports in development for both OS X and Windows.
Your comment would be relevant (and somewhat accurate) if the article was about Linux, which it isn’t.
“Until you can drag an application to an applications folder in Linux”
You can’t do that in Windows either, only in Mac OS X.
“Technically inclined people always argue that you can do all of these things with Linux (and I agree), but until linux acts like what the general public expects it to act like, it is doomed on the desktop, especially when it has to compete with desktops like OSX.”
I’m inclined to agree, but the article still isn’t about Linux.
A long time ago, there was something that was called OpenWindows in the Solaris/SunOS world, but this time it is really OpenWindows:
– It has a button that launches the menu in exactly the same place where Microsoft Windows has it
– It has a clock in exactly the same place where Microsoft Windows has it
– It has a file picker dialog that scrolls horizontally exactly like the one in Microsoft Windows does
– It has an area where the icons of background applications reside in exactly the same place where Microsoft Windows has it
– It has a colour selection dialog that looks exactly like the one from Microsoft Windows does
– It has a feature that reorders minimised applications in the task bar which behaves exactly like on Microsoft Windows
– It has items for searching files, customising the desktop and running commands in exactly the same order as Microsoft Windows
– It has an application that doesn’t know if it’s a file manager, a web browser or something else exactly like Microsoft Internet Explorer
– It has icons and cursors that are jumping around even worse than on Microsoft Windows XP
– It implements ideas that are ten years old from Microsoft Windows as OpenSource, therefore OpenWindows is the best name for it!
you’re right about: the launch button, the taskbar
you’re wrong about:
– the clock, it’s right next to the launch button
– the filepicker: scrolls vertically, has a shelf area
– the color dialog
– the “minimize all applications” (which I assume you mean), it doesn’t autoreopen windows after an action
– the order of items (you mean on the launch menu?), it is different
– the browser, it is plain mozilla, which is launched if you attempt to open a https?:// url in nautilus
– icons and cursors, they’re not jumping around
– the name “openwindows”, it is buried in solaris 10
let me guess: you’ve never seen JDS3, right?
IIRC much of the UI on UNIX was licensed from MS’s Presentation Manager UI built on MS OS/2 platform.
That’s why they look so much a like.
enlighten me but i thought gcc was pretty dam good why would you need the sun compiler
enlighten me but i thought gcc was pretty dam good why would you need the sun compiler
The SUN compiler produces better code sometimes, but the main reason is because of C++ ABI differences between the SUN compiler and the GCC compiler.
> but the main reason is because of C++ ABI differences between the SUN compiler and the GCC compiler.
What exactly does that mean for the developer and for the end user?
Thanks,
Anton
> What exactly does that mean for the
> developer and for the end user?
It means that g++-compiled c++ binaries cannot load sun-compiled c++ libraries and than sun-compiled c++ binaries cannot load g++-compiled c++ libraries. g++ and the sun compiler are as incompatible to each other as g++-2.95/g++-3.2 and g++-3.2/g++-4.0. g++ does not have a stable c++ ABI, it changes every 24 months.
“pretty darn good” is an overstatement – it does a good job, and it excels at portability, but the latter comes at a price, which is that it tends to be worse than specialized compilers (sunpro exists for sparc and ia32/amd64, nothing else – and I wouldn’t assume that the sparc and ia32 backends have much in common)
Once OpenSolaris with KDE (and a nice collection of KDE and Java apps, with Java SDK and J2EE container and NetBeans) is available on a live CD, or can be easily downloaded and installed on my Thinkpad, eMachines PC, or Gateway PC, I’m there.
Solaris / OpenSolaris is intriguiging me more and more. I’m pretty big on Linux (I use Mepis, Fedora, CentOS, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and Kanotix), and I prefer the GPL to the CDDL. But as far as I’m concerned, another good, accessible *nix system thrown into the mix can only be a good thing.
can’t wait till someone (mandrake?) puts together a solaris based disto with kde, xfce on top, and a decent package manager (apt?). that would be a killer combination.
The gnome developers should be taken note of this. Once more kde gets first to a new platform. As I have said in NetBSD related topics, kde's portability is showing its good design with every new port.
No one is working on a Gnome port to OpenSolaris because Sun has their own Gnome port for Solaris – JDS – and the goal is to open up the development process for JDS in the near future as part of OpenSolaris.
See:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Ailing_Sun_desktop_to_get…
Note that JDS is and always has been open source, as it’s based on Gnome, but currently the integration work is done by internal Sun engineers alone.
he was talking about KDE on OpenSolaris not JDS3, don’t you think?
Since there is not a “OpenSolaris distribution”, or at least the closest thing there is to one that can run X11 at all is Solaris Express: Community Release, then JDS3 comes with it, so is just as applicable. The only difference is that KDE may be the “first” from the OpenSolaris community. But “vanilla GNOME” was already available to run via blastwave.org long before KDE 3.4.1, so this article has a mis-leading headline…
Since there is not a “OpenSolaris distribution”, or at least the closest thing there is to one that can run X11 at all is Solaris Express: Community Release, then JDS3 comes with it, so is just as applicable.
I don’t want to add to the noise here, but this comment demonstrates a weakness in OSAlert’ new moderation scheme UI.
The writer above seems to think that this comment:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11285&threshold=-5&limit=…
is in response to this comment:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11285&threshold=-5&limit=…
But it’s not. It’s part of a seperate thread. I’ve seen similar confusion elsewhere.
It happened here because the parent posts in the JDS3 thread have all been modded down. Sure, the subject lines differ, but these two comments follow one another (if you’re reading at default -1 moderation) and both mention JDS. Modded down posts disappear from view, leaving unrelated posts to smush together – sometimes creating a false dialogue. It’s very easy for the casual reader to make mistakes like this.
I think something could be learned from the tree-based Slashdot comment UI here, but I’m not sure. I’m sure there’s a way to make the flow of post-moderated comments seem more obvious, without overcomplicating things. Hope this is something the OSAlert folks are devoting some thought to.
Actually, moderated down posts, should just be folded in.
like:
http://www.newz.dk/forum/item/57182/ – Sorry, for danish language
They have a small [-] on the top, which allows a part to be folded smaller or larger. And depending on your threshhold and others moderation, it will be folded in automatically when you read the thread. And also, you can (when logged in), also specify the nature of the post (Fun, Relevant, Irrelevant, Flamebait and so forth).
And you can also see who modded it up or down. All of it done using javascript posting, so you never leaver the page so to speak.
Works very well.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/roadmap/
Starting from June 2005 and within the next 0..3 months GCC support should be added to OpenSolaris.
So my question is: why “waste time” to try KDE to build with Solaris compiler ?
Did you read any of the thread before asking that? If you had you might have noticed where binarycrusader said
“The SUN compiler produces better code sometimes, but the main reason is because of C++ ABI differences between the SUN compiler and the GCC compiler.”
Unless “adding GCC support” means creating ABI compatibility, the answer to your question should be obvious.
Starting from June 2005 and within the next 0..3 months GCC support should be added to OpenSolaris.
So my question is: why “waste time” to try KDE to build with Solaris compiler ?
Officially added as part of the project perhaps, but as of very recently it is now possible to build all of the sources with GCC using the proper “GCC Gate” sources.
Ahum. Gnome runs already on opensolaris. Before KDE. Blastwave.org.
C.
Ahum. Gnome runs already on opensolaris. Before KDE. Blastwave.org.on
Yes you can run Gnome on opensolaris, but built with GCC. The same thing has been possible with KDE since the 2.x days, so that’s not exatly news. What this is about is KDE built with the Sun Forte compilers(the native compilers on Solaris). Gnome does not build on opensolaris with Forte yet. Pleas RTFA.