OSNews got their hands on the golden master of Java Desktop System (JDS) from Sun Microsystems and we gave it a spin. Here is our review and some screeenshots.
Installation
The Build 12C comes in 6 CDs: 3 binary, 2 source and 1 documentation. The installation will be familiar to SuSE users, as it is based on Yast2 (JDS is based on SuSE Linux). Installation went fine, except for two problems:
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 hdd3 partition, create a custom LILO file and then chroot to hdd3 and use LILO as my boot manager instead of grub. I did check the /boot/grub files on JDS, everything was in order, it’s just that Grub can’t read that menu.lst file when it is not installed on MBR. Sun told me that this seemed like a very specific case, and it seems that it was, as I later installed JDS on my AthlonXP PC and chose the same boot manager and partition setup and indeed worked flawlessly this time.
2. After I managed to boot JDS with LILO and entered the second stage of the installation the evolution-1.4.5 and gnome-user-docs RPMs will stall on 95% forever. Changing a screen and running “top” would reveal that scrollkeeper-up was consuming 100% CPU time and it was the culprit of the stall. I had to twice manually kill scrollkeeper to get on with the rest of the installation (thankfully, both RPMs were installed successfully as I checked later). On my second installation on the AthlonXP the same two files were again stalled for a very long period of time (this time I chose to not disturb scrollkeeper), so this is a totally reproducible problem. It drags the installation time from about 45 minutes to over an hour+.
Overall I found the installation cumbersome. It is very involved (I had to go through 4-5 pref panels to configure monitor and gfx card to my liking), very time consuming (staged installations, going through unnecessary screens sometimes), it is ugly and, under some conditions as above, buggy. The best graphical installer on Linux today is Red Hat’s Anaconda (with only a couple minor UI annoyances) and Sun/SuSE should learn a few things from it. Anaconda retains its power and advanced options (e.g. it has more options than Lycoris’ or Lindows’ installers) without alienating the new user. Yast2 on the other hand is not what I would call a “modern” installer. It is powerful, but it does not come without its share of extra carefulness the user should have as the UI is not well designed and some things are not obvious in their outcome. I hope the Ximian designers at Novell give it a complete redesign soon.
Overall, the default JDS installation takes about 2.5 GB without the dev tools (which are not installed by default).
The Good
After it gets installed, JDS will boot in full graphical mode and load Gnome. JDS comes with a mix of Gnome packages, some are 2.2.1, some are 2.2.2, others are even 2.4.0 (gnome-panel). The final version of JDS has a different Launch icon than the betas had, a different background image and the UI is a bit more polished.
I liked the Launch menu that Sun has put together. It is pretty functional and manageable. If you don’t count the “Extras” menu which has been deprecated by Red Hat and others for being a bad usability decision, other than that, the menu is good: recent items, search for files, log out, applications, preferences on their own placeholder and Star Office 7/Mozilla 1.4/Evolution 1.4.5 are to be found in a ‘quick launch’ position above the Applications on the same menu.
The distro comes with most of the Gnome 2.2 applications, plus a few more: Totem 0.99.2 (gstreamer backend), Epiphany 0.8.x, Gnomemeeting 0.98.1 (beta!), gThumb 2.1.4, Java Media Player (no XMMS though), a Gtk 2.x version of GtKam, Gaim 0.70, and, of course, Star Office 7, Real Player, Jedit and 3 other Java applications. The Flash plugin and Java plugin work perfectly with the OS. The distro comes with kernel 2.4.19 and GCC 3.2.2.
The Yast2 modules are part of the preferences menu or the System:/// VFS Nautilus module. There, you can find additional Yast2 preferences, like configuring your NFS, Samba, services, advanced administration panel etc. Users who have used SuSE will find a familiar ground here. While the Yast2 modules (as the Yast2 installation) are ugly and they seem to be out of place (they don’t correspond to the default Gnome theme or font) they ultimately do the job.
Star Office 7 is included and provides a powerful alternative to MS Office for all small and medium sized businesses. The $80-worth SO7 is a major part of the OS’ marketing and maybe it can be called as its main feature. The suite worked well and read successfully all my “normal” .doc files, but it failed miserably on .doc files that had mathematic symbols (I was sent such documents by Intel for an OSNews article a few months ago).
Java is installed by default and it works well. I loaded a few java apps, like Limewire and they ran as expected.
Nautilus has been patched to support new VFS modules while its main window opens the “My Computer” screen instead of the user’s home folder. The My Computer includes links to all removable disks, other automatically mounted Linux partitions (not FAT or NTFS though by default), Networked links, PDAs etc. I quite like this arrangement, but there is a problem with the naming. Sun calls everything that is mounted “removable drives.” I fail to see how my internal IDE IBM drive is “removable” (it can be “unmounted”, but it is not “removable”), while my CD-RW is also titled “removable” (correctly) but it has a hard disk icon instead of a CD-rom icon and so it is extremely confusing what is what over there…
A good addition on JDS’ Nautilus is the ability to automatically refresh the contents on a Nautilus window when files are changed. On my Slackware (also with ReiserFS) I have to manually click “refresh” to see the new contents and its Gnome is even newer than JDS’.
It is nice to see that Sun applied some of Ximian’s patches, for example for the GTK+ file selector, which now is the same as in the latest Ximian Gnome. Too bad Sun didn’t take on the Ximian Preferences window too, though.
There is an online updater for the OS, same as in SuSE, however it requires you to enter product registration information before it can be used (which I was not given by Sun, so I couldn’t test this feature).
The Gnome Panel 2.4 has seen a few patches too: most applets can be locked, while there are a few additions too, like a search applet named web-eyes and Quick Lounge. Evolution has also seen patches from the default and it is now dubbed “Evolution Java Desktop System Edition.” I have no idea what they have changed exactly though (Evolution is a big app to easily single out details).
A personal request would be to add nano or pico or jed to the distro. If a new Linux user gets stuck on text mode for some reason, using vi or emacs is not really an option for most.
Except for two totally reproducible crashes with Nautilus and Mozilla 1.4.1 (see next page), I found JDS extremely stable, maybe even more stable than other distros’ desktop software I tried lately (overall, certainly more stable than Fedora’s or Yellow Dog Linux’s apps for example).
The Bad
There are a few problems with the distro as explained below, but I had one big problem and one big gripe with this distro:
The biggest problem:
JDS would not work with my network card on my second test installation (it worked fine on my first test PC with a 3Com card). My network card is supported by Linux, in fact I have 4 more Linux distros on that AthlonXP machine which all work great. I tried to find out what’s up with it, and I noticed that the module for RealTek 8139 is loaded (onboard NIC on a VIA chipset mobo), that the configuration on Yast2 is perfectly right, the connector is fine, it is able to ping itself by IP (10.0.0.9) but it couldn’t reach any other PC on our network, or the internet. That was obviously a driver bug, and so I did my homework and tried to search on Google for similar problems (with the help of an “ifup eth0” error I was getting). Bingo! SuSE has this bug on its kernels for almost a year now (this happens on specific revisions of the RT8139). In fact it seems to be a SuSE-only bug and Sun has inherited for its distro too now it seems. There is no resolution for this bug but to recompile your kernel manually. I downloaded the latest 2.4.23 and used Sun’s .config file, compilation went well, but on reboot I was getting a kernel panic that could not mount the rootfs because the kernel could not find the reiserfs module, while its .o file was in the right place (for some reason Sun’s default .config compiles it as module, even if the default fs is ReiserFS on Yast2). Giving it one last shot later, loading the default .config from my Slackware and then recompiling ALSA 0.9.8, had me up and running on JDS on that AthlonXP machine. I believe that both Sun and SuSE should look into this 8138too.o bug more carefully.
The biggest gripe:
It does not include KDE support. I am not talking about including KDE as an alternative DE to Gnome, because Sun is committed on Gnome and it does make product-sense to only provide a single supported D. However, by not including the kdelibs and a newer Qt package, it rules out the ease of installing more Linux applications. Let’s face it, at least 50-60% of the Linux GUI software today is written for the Qt toolkit and the KDE libs, for one or the other reason that I won’t explain here. By not including KDE support, Sun immediately shred away the hopes of users to install more software! There is no burning application coming with the distro for example (except the very plain burn:/// Nautilus VFS module). There are 2-3 third party Gnome GTK+ 1.x burning apps out there but they are outdated, difficult to use and ugly, while the KDE-based K3B is the one app on Linux that is powerful and pretty easy to use and that even does DVD burning too. There are other very good reasons for users to need KDE/Qt functionality (KStars, KDevelop, TheKompany apps etc), and JDS doesn’t make that easy. There is the ancient Qt 3.1.1 installed by default, but *only* because it is a dependency on Yast2 tools and not for other reasons! Manually installing a newer Qt and KDE on the default locations might break Yast2 and installing Qt elsewhere can be tricky, so that is not a good option either. I believe that Sun has tremendously limited their OS by removing KDE application functionality.
Other Annoyances:
Sun has designed its own theme, named BluePrint. The theme is nothing extraordinary, it has some interesting widget implementations (e.g. the rounded input boxes, the sliders etc) while other parts of it are absolutely hideous, e.g. the default gray color and the window manager. The window manager design is just as ugly as it can go plus it is not practical (it is almost impossible to see the buttons of an unfocused window). The default gray application background color makes the whole OS feel oh-so-Win95 that it isn’t even funny. I had to go to themes and change my theme to the light gray/white version of the same theme, in order to make the desktop feel more welcome. And if that wasn’t enough, the BluePrint theme is slow. Switching to the Default Gnome theme it gives me the same level of Fedora’s speed, but with it, it is just slow on the AthlonXP 1.4 GHz.
Everyone’s bitching on Gnome for not having a menu editor, but under JDS things are worse than usual. Normally what you do is go to start-here:/// and the Applications are listed there, and then by using these entries as normal shortcuts you can edit your gnome menu. But on JDS, start-here:/// does not work. It does not display anything when called, and so there is no easy way to edit the JDS menu. And yes, there is a good reason why someone would want to do this, because both Epiphany and Real Player are included by default in the installation and they don’t have entries at all on the menu! I was really surprised that Sun forgot Real Player off their menu because they did such a big noise about it a few weeks ago and did a press release about it too.
Sun has (deliberately, because of license issues?) left out of Gaim the Gadu-Gadu and MSN plugins. The MSN plugin could be quite a blow for offices as many companies use it as their main IM software (I know my previous company in UK used to). On other desktop software disappointments count the Totem-gstreamer inability to play a simple .mpg video (the Fanimatrix trailer in particular, 14 MB), while Totem plays it fine on both my Fedora and Slackware.
The other problem I stumbled upon is Samba. I shared via Samba a folder on my Mac OS X Panther machine (newly acquired dual PowerMac G4) and tried to get connected to it via the Network Places panel on Nautilus (which creates shortcuts) and via directly typing smb://10.0.0.12/eugenia/ on Nautilus’ URL bar. The first way will crash Nautilus and the second will just not connect. Other Linux distros have other problems with the samba VFS module for Nautilus, so one thing is for sure: the smb VFS module desperately needs fixing at many levels. Using smbmount from the command line works perfectly. The samba version used by JDS is 2.2.x.
Java applications are downright ugly and out of place, no matter if this distro is called “Java Desktop System” or not. I know that Sun is working on a way for Java to use GTK+ themes, but except some Sun Java apps no one else is using the technology and so even the included Java apps don’t feel integrated to the rest of the environment. But that’s all well known, here is the worst part. Check the screenshot, these are five Java apps all from the /Extras/Java Applications/ menu. ALL five of them are using different theming/widget set (only the Java Media Player of the five uses the GTK+ engine)! It is one thing to have Java apps not look like the Gnome apps, but having 5 java apps and all look different from each other, well, it is too much for anyone to bear. Additionally, all the SuSE setting GUI panels are based on Qt, and so these look even more different. It is like torture.
More over, I completely fail to see the point of advertising the fact in the /Extra menu that these apps are “Java Applications” (or was that a warning?). The user should not care if these apps were Java or GTK+ or Qt, these are implementation details that should be absolutely transparent to the desktop user.
Mozilla would crash consistently when clicking to download RPMs, e.g. here (because of the Real Player plugin, but this doesn’t happen on my Slackware with Real also installed). Another bug I found was with gThumb. Turning on the “Image Preview”, would do nothing. Also for those who asked me via email yesterday, SuSE’s RPMs don’t seem to work with JDS. There are unsatisfied dependencies on libc, libcrypto, ssl etc.
Lastly, the overall speed of the OS won’t win any awards. All in all, I found it more slugish than Fedora (when using the default Blueprint theme) and with much worse mouse movements (Fedora has special kernel support for that) but with better multitasking than Fedora at very specific places (Fedora’s RedHat menu stalls some times and doesn’t open for a few seconds). My Slackware 9.1 (also on the same AthlonXP machine but on a slower, Samsung, drive) beats both of them on desktop performance noticeably while using Gnome 2.4.x.
Conclusion
It is important to remember that this desktop system is meant for the enterprise and corporate desktops and not for home desktops. JDS and its accompanied applications are certainly very stable once up and running and it has good support options plus its price is at very good levels and includes the whole Star Office 7 deal. It is certainly a good alternative to MS Windows for corporate usage, however it does have its problems as you saw above. Some admins might dislike the fact that installing KDE support manually is too much work and it might break things. However, compared to Windows XP, JDS does come with a good price, plus Star Office 7 immediately adds a great value to the package.
Sun told me a few months ago that they see Microsoft as their main competitor for this particular product, but I also see Red Hat and SuSE as major competitors as they will try to take on the same corporate customers. Luckily for Sun, Red Hat’s cheapest product now costs $170 (70-80 bucks more expensive than JDS; corporations won’t endorse the free Fedora as it doesn’t have support) while SuSE’s recent purchase by Novell has put a break on their sales as most big customers want to know what will Novell do with these products before they buy in. So yeah, Sun does have a good chance to grab a good portion of the Linux/Unix corporate desktop market with JDS, and because of its fair price and SO7 inclusion, they can overcome the distro’s shortcomings in the eyes of its buyers.
Will it sell? I think it will, especially among existing Sun Solaris customers, as this product interoperates well with Solaris and other Sun server products. Will it become very widely successful? Only time will tell, but if Sun give out a free unsupported version it will certainly help its spread out. Nevertheless, the product should get more polish and care before I give it better marks. And some innovation too instead of a stock cut-down SuSE distro with SO7 and a brand name behind it.
Installation: 6.5/10
Hardware Support: 7/10
Ease of use: 7.5/10
Features: 7/10
Credibility: 7.5/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 7/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 7.08
that Sun has themed GTK to be very similar to the look of Java apps. nice idea.
Yeah, only problem is the default Metal look and feel is dead ugly, and many developers have countless gripes with it.
That said, its really disappointing to see that Sun hasn’t done anything to improve the integration of Java into the Gnome desktop. They really should work on getting GTK themes to work under Swing so that Java apps don’t stick out like a sore thumb. I had hoped that the Java Desktop might have some good integration with Java, but it looks to be merely a marketing ploy.
There are TWO Java-GTK+ themes, one is the normal GTK+ 1.x theme and the other one is BluePrint. If you are running as GTK+ BluePrint the Java Media Player will use BluePrint too. If you change your theme, it will default to the GTK+ 1.x look. But all the other Java apps don’t take advantage of this ability, and so they look like Java.
If it is Suse derived, does that make it unitedlinux compatible?
Isn’t that ‘Looking Glass’ thing in this release ?
I totally agree with their not including qt btw. 2 toolkits is enough (gtk,swing). I wish more distributions would go either kde or gnome, it feels much nicer and you avoid interoperability issues (though there are far fewer than there used to be)
Well, as far as I can tell by reading this review, not much has changed since I reviewed the beta edition of JDS, a few weeks ago. Too bad… I expected much more of a company like Sun.
Let’s just hope that they do listen to criticism, which can eventually lead to an improved distro
Overall I found the installation cumbersome. It is very involved (I had to go through 4-5 pref panels to configure monitor and gfx card to my liking), very time consuming (staged installations, going through unessasery screens sometimes), it is ugly and, under some conditions as above, buggy.
Linux … seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Let’s see how well Xandros 2.0 fares.
Which is still pretty shabby, given that its called the Java desktop. Since they had GTK themes since Java 1.4.2, it wouldn’t have been too difficult for them to have modified the Java VM to apply the current GTK theme to all Java apps.
Btw, how native do the Java apps that make use of the GTK+ BluePrint L&F look? When running on RedHat, Java apps can take on the BlueCurve theme, but they still stick out because the fonts are just different from the rest of the system.
>Isn’t that ‘Looking Glass’ thing in this release ?
No.
>I totally agree with their not including qt btw. 2 toolkits is enough (gtk,swing).
It is NOT about toolkits. It is about software choice. Most apps for linux today ARE for KDE/QT. By cutting out their users from *easily* installing Qt/KDE apps (without having to compile stuff) in my opinion is very limiting.
The only Java app that uses the GTK+ themes is the Java MEdia Player, all other Java apps included there aren’t. So, it is not enough to judge how integrated feels.
Nice.. on their website they say it’s available December 2nd.. lovely of them to change it without letting people know. That peeves me off.
That’s what I read *elsewhere* and mentioned it there, might be Dec 2nd though. Don’t know 100% of this.
I hate to say this, because I think Sun is a great company, but I haven’t found a piece of artwork (themes, icons, etc..) created at Sun that I like. I wish Sun had licensed the Alloy look and feel for Java from Incors. See http://www.incors.com/lookandfeel/ and made a Gtk theme out of it. It looks a LOT more professional than BluePrint seems to from the screenshots.
Also not including at least kdelibs and a modern Qt is horrible. They have to include Qt anyways for SuSE’s tools, so why not include a version of Qt that actually WORKS with the latest stable version of KDE? If anybody wanted to install a KDE application like k3b (best burner on Linux bar none), they are going to have upgrade Qt, which means that Yast could get broken. Which means bye bye system configuration tools. That is simply not acceptible for their customers.
I’m sorry but most apps are not for Qt/KDE. As a matter of fact I use no qt based applications at all. And I use Linux full time, every day, both at home at and work. It is perfectly reasonable for Sun to not include KDE. I, for one, am glad that somebody finally had the nerve to not include both.
I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE. Why? Because the dev tools and ease of use programming-wise are better with Qt than it is on GTK+. I like Gnome2 better as a DE and this is why I only use Gnome2, but the dev environment of KDE has no parallel compared to the crufty GTK+ and its complexities. The Gnome people really need to create powerful dev tools as the KDE people have.
Odd that it would run slow even on your athlon xp, the minimum system req’ds are a PII 266 (god only knows how painful that would be) and sun makes a point on their product page about “leveraging older hardware” with JDE.
Also am I the only one who thinks that sun’s position of only 1 year worth of support is ridiculous? Microsoft gives you 5.
Interesting review.
I think I’ll try to aviod this desktop system like the black death…
I would like to know what is this Ximian Preferences patch? Do you have a link (or screenshot! =))?
Victor.
just as we had nice fonts in linux sun is gonna throw those ugly java fonts in again.
just look at the screenshots and try not to cry.
I would like to see a review with a “clean” hard drive installation. Honestly, how many corporations are going to have multiple OSs installed on their hardware? Not many. I found that once I limited myself to one linux OS on my crappy laptop, the thing runs flawlessly. Can we please have a “PLATINUM” review with just JDS on the hardware? Thank you.
This has no effect to the review. JDS was alone on its own hard drive, no messing around with Slackware or Fedora.
Stop doing this. Your comments are NOT deleted, they are moded down, just click to read them.
This article is the worst-edited one I’ve seen in a long while. It’s chock full of grammatical errors. Don’t you have anyone look at your articles before you post them? I always do whenever I’m writing in Arabic or French (not my native language).
Here are a few:
* “Nautilus has being patched to support new VFS modules” should read “Nautilus has been patched to support new VFS modules.”
* “Too bad Sun didn’t took on the Ximian Preferences window too, though.” “Too bad Sun didn’t take the Ximian Preferences window too, though.”
* ‘Evolution has also seen patches from the default and it is now dumbed “Evolution Java Desktop System Edition.”‘ I didn’t know that dumb is a verb. In any case, I doubt that the Sun Evolution is really _that_ bad.
* “I was really surprised with Sun forgetting Real Player off their menu because they did such a big noise about it a few weeks ago and did a press release about it too.” Sun is a company and therefore is an it, not a they. Also, the first part should read, “I was really surprised that Sun forgot RealPlayer…”
The article has some other problems. You complain about the installer and then do not include any screenshots of it. That doesn’t help your case any.
You also say that JDS is more stable than other distros you’ve tried of late and then you site the buggiest one out there, Fedora. You ought to stop using Red Hat’s buggy stuff and then you’ll get some stability. Try Xandros 2.0, Slackware, Debian, Libranet, Lindows, or SuSE 9.0 and you’ll get the stability you want.
I have the same network card as you (on 2 machines) and have not experienced the module problems you experience with SuSE 8.2 and 9.0.
One of the main features of JDS is its integration with the Sun line of products. Apparently, you don’t have access to any Solaris machines and didn’t do any reporting on this except for a few sentences at the end.
As I explained in the mod down comments, we do the best we can. The article HAS being proof read by an english person.
The installer is the same as SuSE’s, there is nothing new there to see.
> I have the same network card as you (on 2 machines) and have not experienced the module problems you experience with SuSE 8.2 and 9.0.
Not all the models have the problem. RT8139 has about 15 revisions.
Your comment in the article “50%-60% of linux software written today is for Qt/KDE” would be considered flamebait if someone posted it here in the comment section. Can you substantiate this claim? [‘Substantiate’ means ‘provide evidence for’.]
If you really feel that the Qt/KDE development tools are superior, why don’t you commission an objective comparison article for this site? I would be interested to see if an objective reviewer found Qt/KDE tools to be superior. [The trick, of course, would be setting up the comparison in a way that maintainted objectivity.] I admit that I don’t know the answer to this question, I would be interested to read such a comparison.
Finally, I prefer Gnome myself, and I don’t find any lack of Gnome applications. In fact, I seem to find proportionately more Gnome than KDE applications. With the exception of k3B, which I agree is excellent, I find most Qt/KDE applications to be on par with the typical Windows shareware Visual Basic application – a pile of crap. They tend to be all color and sparkly icons, and incomprehensible UI. I personally would love it if KDE just went away (as long as someone ported k3B to Gnome).
I would be interested to see if an objective reviewer found Qt/KDE tools to be superior.
—-
Actually, almost everyone considers KDE’s IDEs superior to Glade and friends.
And if you think Nautilus is better than Konqueror, you need to put the crackpipe down. Konqueror runs circles around it in speed and has about 4x as many features.
Good review. Hahaha!! You look at the screenshots, and it is immediately obvious that SUN has a hideous artistic taste.
>> It is important to remember that this desktop system is meant for the enterprise and corporate desktops and not for home desktops.
>>
Doesn’t matter. Corporate employees are home users at work. If it doesn’t look good enough for the home computer, it probably isn’t comfortable enough for the office computer either.
That article WAS proofread by an english-speaking person. You don’t have to nitpick you know. We all do the best we can.
I realize this, I really wasn’t trying to be rude, just give constructive criticism. If you aren’t aware there is a problem you can’t fix it. Now you are aware.
This site has by far the most reliably interesting links, conversation, and articles posted of anything comparable I have encountered. Thank you for that.
“I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE.”
Where are you getting this information? I haven’t read anything that backs up this statement. I would appreciate it if you could elaborate where you got these facts.
This is easy to know. Go to apps.kde.com and then go to gnome2’s repository and see the difference in the number of Gnome2 and KDE apps. KDE has more apps per day.
It is funny how there are so many angry gnomers like you nowadays
. No objectivity. Cheerleaders. They do not want to Gnome to grow. They don’t look at KDE to see what has been done wright. You want KDE to fail? Why?
You should look to what the others desktops are doing wright.
Gnome in general does do, and KDE also. Gnome is looking to be more integrated, as KDE is. KDE is looking for saner and simpler defaults (you should see a big difference in KDE 3.2), as gnome has. They both improve. This is good.
KDE is looking for saner and simpler defaults (you should see a big difference in KDE 3.2), as gnome has.
If this is true, that would be great. I barely have to configure a default Gnome desktop so it won’t bother me, but KDE in it’s current incarnation is like having 20.000 elephants running at you all at the same time..
Eugenia all you have to do is go to the KDE site and get the newest KDE packages for SuSE Linux and they install fine from the Command Line. Then you have to create the .xinitrc. One bug that I did find in using this method is that Konsole will not change the schema, dont ask me why. I reported it to the KDE mailing list and they said as soon as they get a copy of JDS they will see whats up with it. Otherwise everything else works good and no it doesnt break YaST.
“$100 / desktop / year.” Not much of a deal. Most of the supplied software is free.
I was made to understand that there are more gtk apps than there are qt ones. With regards to which toolkit is better between qt and gtk, I think qt is a bit better, but I also think it is quite over hyped.
People also fail to acknowledge that GTK is the best implementation of an object oriented framework in the C language. I simply haven’t seen it done any better, correct me if I’m wrong. For pure C coders (True coders ;-), this is a rare gift.
And even though GTK is unfairly bad mouthed by everyone. Experienced coders marvel at the careful crafted works of this mentally super human developers. The same goes for the GLIB developers.
I just skimmed over the article and I’m not quite sure if I missed any other stuff, but I saw you mentioning GNOME doesn’t automatically refresh directories in Nautilus, while JDE does.
This is not true. What’s probably wrong with your Slackware install is that it lacks FAM, the File Alteration Monitor.
This is not just used in Nautilus, btw, it’s used all over. The theme chooser, for example, automatically updates when you add a (meta-)theme.
FAM’s homepage is located here: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam/
I heard that JDS is based on SuSE 8.1. Is this really true?
Maybe the KDE packages from SuSE 8.1 could be used with JDS.
I’m a little confused here — how is JDS different from any other distro? It uses a typical installer to install a typical distro of Gnome with all the usual gnome applications. Sure, it comes with java preimnstalled…. but it would appear that the average joe wouldn’t actually launch anything that depended on java anyway
So where is the “Java” in JDS?
jeff
“People also fail to acknowledge that GTK is the best implementation of an object oriented framework in the C language.”
This is right. But I doubt that many programmers would choose C for an OO system today.
“I simply haven’t seen it done any better, correct me if I’m wrong. For pure C coders (True coders ;-), this is a rare gift.”
I see it more like poison then a gift. This C code is full of ugly marcros, structures, and casts. Just program a class in C and one in C++ or C#, you’ll see a difference. It would be much more readable if they would use an oo supporting language. In Planet Gnome there were already comments from prominent Gnome hackers how much more beautiful (which means also more maintanable) the code could be in C# or other languages.
GTK developers realize the limitations of C, that’s why they make bindings for multiple languages.
You don’t have to use C to make GNOME apps. Look at the Caffeine file-sharing program. It’s all in python.
eugenia did you combine your custom kernel 2.4.23 with a suitable initrd when you tried to boot your system with it ? Maybe that was the problem.
It doesn’t support kde !!! That’s a big minus minus 🙁
I would rather stay with Lindows and/or Linare !!!
Bob
It is actually based on SuSE 8.2
Java applications looking different is Sun’s own fault. I like programming (simple) swing user interfaces since it’s so easy to do in code, but swing just doesn’t look good, no wonder app writers use a different look and feel than the default one. Hopefully the gtk integration will help out with that.
I think sun is pitching their desktop towards business users. (secretaries and the like). Installing programs (other than MSN messenger
) is only of interest to enthusiasts. The average business does not want it’s average computer user to be an enthusiast as they waste time installing and uninstalling programs/operating systems.
Qt is better than straight GTK+, but it isn’t all that great compared to GTKmm, though, which is the bigger problem the KDE project is going to start facing. New coders are familiar with the STL from school. Qt doesn’t use it. GTKmm does. I would not be surprised to see some migration…
-Erwos
Not surprising they didn’t include KDE. Remember, KDE isn’t Section 508 compliant, it has no accesibility toolkit yet. More than likely they had to ship a Section 508 compliant desktop, which Gnome 2.4.x is generally speaking…
I’m still wondering how this compares with K12Linux-LTSP http://www.k12ltsp.org/ . (Hint for a future review by Eugenia?)
I’ve been very impressed with how easy it was to set up a multi-terminal system with K12LTSP. I know JDS has paid-for support and (at present) slightly more recent versions of some applications. But then K12LTSP supports Windows Terminal Server, and costs much less: for the price of n thousand desktops at $100/year, I can buy a lot of full-time support!
If anything, the review here and subsequent comments point out the weaknesses of the Linux community, not necessarily of Sun. Sun has pretty much combined a basic Linux distro with a few applications and is passing it out (to businesses, not home users). I’m not sure how responsible Sun can truly be for segmentation faults in Nautilus and hardware incompatibilities.
Installation problems, ease of use issues, uglification — most of these things I’ve experienced rather commonly in my Linux endeavors. Should we really have expected anything different with JDS?
I’m not sure what Sun’s exact strategy is, but if this JDS is something they want to really take to a higher level, they’d probably be better off bringing in some advanced user interface experts/artists and get a really clean, integrated, nice desktop that could run on Solaris x86 w/ full binary compatibility with Linux apps. Then they could drop Linux like a bad habit. I mean, 50% of this thread is KDE vs. GNOME. What does that say???
JMO,
John
The QT containers pretty easy to figure out, and besides, have an STL-like compatibility interface. Most new programmers won’t know enough of the STL to be shocked by the difference between the real STL and the compatibility interface, and experienced programmers won’t blink twice, since Qt’s regular interface is very intuitive if you have a good grasp of OOP.
One more plug: The Qt (and to a less extent, KDE) code is *phenomenally* clean. Its not a big deal, but I’ve made several small customizations to Qt/KDE, and they’ve taken me very little time. Its just very elegant.
Is this the same OS Sun is selling to China?
I can’t believe it.
Thanks for the review. Nice to see a critical review and I’d love to see how you review XP. I’m sure it would have some seriously bad scores! Also, praise to Sun for this product. While their deriders profess they will be squashed by Linux, they are innovating and changing and, basically, doing for themselves what M$FT should be doing (getting in place to profit from Linux/Open Source). I thought the Mandrake install was far easier than Windows and would assume this good of an install from Sun.
BTW, I would also love to see a good critical review of what app.s are needed on Linux. E.g. on Windows a good File Manager is not provided and I did not find one on Linux either. Usable ones but not great. Also, the navigational mouse in myIE2 and others is a step function improvement that M$FT failed to do but one would assume Sun included in JDS/Nautilus.
Thanks for the review,
TimJowers
Great article, quite useful too.
“I see it more like poison then a gift. This C code is full of ugly marcros, structures, and casts. Just program a class in C and one in C++ or C#, you’ll see a difference. It would be much more readable if they would use an oo supporting language. In Planet Gnome there were already comments from prominent Gnome hackers how much more beautiful (which means also more maintanable) the code could be in C# or other languages.”
GTK+ is concrete proof and evidence that C does make a good object oriented frame work, contrary to popular misnomer. 90% of GNOME is written on base on GTK+ and it’s associated libraries, like Glib.
With regards to ugliness of code, I’ve seen far more uglier Java and C++ code than I have seen C. And I’m talking about large projects here. Talk to any of the KDE devs, and they’ll narrate the horror and ugliness of majority of the classes they need to deal with. In fact, they are rewriting the kdelibs for KDE-4.0 just because of this.
Writing good C code is hard, I agree. But because python, perl and C# look better to the eye and are very forgiving doesn’t make them more manageable. They get really nasty, and spaghetti-looking faster than their C counterpart. I’m not even going to talk about speed, flexibility and control.
And if you think Nautilus is better than Konqueror, you need to put the crackpipe down. Konqueror runs circles around it in speed and has about 4x as many features.
I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn’t know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time.
If my only two options were Nautilus and Konq, I’d choose Nautilus; but I still think the command line is the best file manager.
I’m not saying this is what you should think. I just wanted to point out that others have different opinions.
Very-very well said Iconclast.
I am usually very supportive of SUN when it comes to their softwae, I like what they’ve done with StarOffice 7 a lot, I like the direction they are taking Java in with 1.5, but this is a brutal dissapointment.
JDS, is despite what they have said usability, and aesthetics are definitely not its strong point. Not having icons for important and marketed applications, throwing more than 5 themes at the user, and mixing so many technologies that don’t mix all that well yet (Qt, GTK+) is unacceptable. Their branding is also way out of hand, it seems nowdays any software SUN makes will be branded with a dozen Java stickers regardless of what it actually is. Just looking at the screenshots I see that the start menu has a java label, nautilus has a java label, and Mozilla too, this is going overboard and it would have helped if they at least used a consistent logo.
It also seems that this is quite a bit out of date, its using GNOME 2.2.x while now the GNOME team is already hard at work on 2.6. However, I am glad at least that the applied some useful pathces like the file selector and automatic refresh patches. Also, at least it is more recent than the latest Solaris version of GNOME. In addition to being out of date they fail to include a number of essential applications such as XMMS, GAIM, a good burning application like K3b and as Eugenia mentioned, KDE/Qt libraries. As I was fearing multimedia support isn’t all that great either despite their advertising, no mpeg support is just plain sad for a modern OS.
On a more positive note, while the speed isn’t great, at least it is usually a stable operating system and it has a multi-billion company behind it with a name that everybody in the industry knows. I just hope that they are serious about this, their opinions on Linux throughout history have been very contradictory and as they’ve said they have no REAL linux strategy and are just supporting it because the market is forcing them to.
I am very displeased with SUN’s offer, I hope that maybe the final version will be far better, but I doubt it to be honest. I don’t know why their product ended up this way, they have used a respectable distribution, SUSE as their base and it’s already been a long time, by its release it will already be severly out of date compared to Xandros, SUSE, Mandrake, and Fedora. This definitely doesen’t seem like a good choice for new users and I am even skeptical about companies using it, sure they will have system administrators and professional support, but time is money and getting this up to spec sounds like it will be a pain in the arse and $100/per year is not cheap even for companies. For a first release this is still decent and I am sure it will get much better as time passes and SUN gains some good experience in the field of Linux.
On a sidenote, I admit that I like KDE more than GNOME for a number of reasons which I will not go into here, but I also like GNOME and I think its a shame that SUN isn’t showing what it can really do, 2.4 is significantly better than 2.2 in terms of speed and polish.
Also, KDE needs a lot more regognition, donations, and perhaps a real corporate sponsor. Right now it is looking pretty great for GNOME in terms of money and users, with the recent adoption of JDS by the Chinese this is a major step forward for GNOME as were the wins in schools and Mexico. They are also well backed by corporate sponsors such as SUN, Ximian, Redhat, and IBM to name a few. They are getting thousands of dollars of donations, while KDE’s donations are minuscule in comparrison. This is in part KDE’s fault as they are against blunt begging for donations and not too aggresive or competitive on their donations page. For example GNOME’s Friends program has different levels which yield small gifts, donations are tax refundable and they have a great charter and website for it all.
While GNOME deserves this, I think KDE deserves it just a much if not more, in any case they NEED it more, only about 5 developers are actually hired to work on KDE. It’s amazing how far the project has come.
If you use KDE or think it’s a good project please don’t hesitate to donate a little, to it. It is free software, but NOT free to develop, which goes for all of open source. Show the developers that you appreciate their work by contributing. BTW: This is the WRONG way to ask feature requests: http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kde/kde20031130_69.html
Anyway, go here to help KDE: http://www.kde.org/support/
Also, EUGENIA, can we expect a review of Xandros Deluxe Desktop 2.0? I am really looking forward to see how you perceive it and its general problems. I’m sure you’ll get a review copy if you have a convincing request, I got a review copy for Xandros 1.0, which I’ve been using exclusively on one of my boxes ever since.
There are TWO Java-GTK+ themes, one is the normal GTK+ 1.x theme and the other one is BluePrint. If you are running as GTK+ BluePrint the Java Media Player will use BluePrint too. If you change your theme, it will default to the GTK+ 1.x look. But all the other Java apps don’t take advantage of this ability, and so they look like Java.
Then again, as you said, this is being used in an enterprise environment, meaning, Joe Employee will/shouldn’t have access to the desktop customisation, hence, those “issues” shouldn’t arise.
From what I have heard J2SE 1.4.2 was just to get basic theming support and 1.5 (Project Tiger) will include more comprehensive support.
“Not surprising they didn’t include KDE. Remember, KDE isn’t Section 508 compliant, it has no accesibility toolkit yet. More than likely they had to ship a Section 508 compliant desktop, which Gnome 2.4.x is generally speaking…”
She never said to include the full blown KDE desktop as an alternative. Two desktops can be overkill for support to handle and its no wonder that only the desktop they were pushing was included. But even so, I would have liked if KDE could be included as an unsupported desktop through the custom install, as it is on Redhat Linux.
The problem is that essential KDE libraries were not included and it is using an outdated version of Qt making installing many of the available KDE/Qt applications impossible to install without a lot of effort and time is money so this is a definite minus. There are areas where GNOME/GTK+ applications just don’t cut it or exist to match KDE/Qt applications.
“I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn’t know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time. ”
Konqueror does do a little of everything and its interface is too cluttered and its context menus are a mess in the current iteration of KDE. However, as for being disjointed, that is NOT in the least bit true. Konquer is a beautiful filemanager/web browser when it comes to integration. Everything is seamless, I can drag and drop an image to my desktop and it will ask me if I want it to become a background or just a link or copy for example. Konqueror is in many ways shows the beauty of Kparts, it is the center of KDE technology and runs the code you need on demand. Integration is key and in this area Konqueror delivers and Nautilus has and still is greately lacking.
As for going in all directions, it all depends on the plugins loaded. Konquror is really a shell and you just plug in parts to make it what it is. I think that it often has downfalls in usability and consistency because it is also a web browser in addition to being a file manager, but otherwise it is great.
It should also be noted that KDE 3.2 will cleanup many longstanding usability issues in KDE and it will fix thousands of bugs and add/remove many features.
I hate to say this, because I think Sun is a great company, but I haven’t found a piece of artwork (themes, icons, etc..) created at Sun that I like. I wish Sun had licensed the Alloy look and feel for Java from Incors. See http://www.incors.com/lookandfeel/ and made a Gtk theme out of it. It looks a LOT more professional than BluePrint seems to from the screenshots.
Well, if you have been following SUN for some time, they try to make the look ‘n feel “SUN’ish” as if to fit in with their purple boxes and give it an “industrial” look. IMHO, there is nothing wrong with the theme when in comparision to Luna (Windows XP) or what MacOS 10.2 uses (10.3 is a major improvement).
Also not including at least kdelibs and a modern Qt is horrible. They have to include Qt anyways for SuSE’s tools, so why not include a version of Qt that actually WORKS with the latest stable version of KDE? If anybody wanted to install a KDE application like k3b (best burner on Linux bar none), they are going to have upgrade Qt, which means that Yast could get broken. Which means bye bye system configuration tools. That is simply not acceptible for their customers.
Why should they support that? this is a corporate desktop, Joe Employee has NO right to install cd burning tools, and even if they DID want to burn a cd, they could easily put the CD into the drive and use the built in Nautilus CD burning tool.
The fact remains, a corporate desktop is looked down to the point the end user can only do their work and that is it. The fact that they can’t install software or tweak the interface is a none issue when in the larger scheme of things, the whole point of them being there is to work.
I realize that Konq has a lot of functionality, but I hate the way it looks and works. It seems too disjointed; like a project that really didn’t know in what direction it wanted to go, so it compromised and went in all directions at the same time.
You must like screwing around with the settings. As for me, I like using a file manager rather than playing with it. Konqueror gets the job done. Nautilus is a dumbed-down plaything since GNOME 2.0.
The reason I chose open source is that it provides me with choice. Nautilus takes away my choices. This is why, IMHO, KDE will always be preferred by power users and home users while the coporate suits will prefer to make employees use GNOME.
I am sorry, but I disagree. Most apps written today are for Qt/KDE. Why? Because the dev tools and ease of use programming-wise are better with Qt than it is on GTK+. I like Gnome2 better as a DE and this is why I only use Gnome2, but the dev environment of KDE has no parallel compared to the crufty GTK+ and its complexities. The Gnome people really need to create powerful dev tools as the KDE people have.
Considering that their main aim is to get IT people to write in-house applications in Java, the IDE doesn’t really matter as Netbeans and Eclipse and quite good already.
From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window? What is so hard with creating something either like KDevelop or even something as basic as Qt Designer?
I guess MS has nothing to fear from this Lin-strousity. Just another failed linux distro folks move on ! Nothing to see here.
I guess MS has nothing to fear from this Lin-strousity. Just another failed linux distro folks move on ! Nothing to see here.
So I guess the Telstra Australia is a real fool deploying it? infact, Microsoft was so concerned, Bill Gates came “down under” to try and stop this “terrible chain of events” from going any further.
Microsoft is concerned. Once you lose the corporate world, you lose the home user. They know it, I know it, SUN knows it. It it is the most well kept and well known secret of the IT industry.
Same goes for AMD. Once desktops in the corporate world start using AMD based machines, you then have a trickle down effect.
“Why should they support that? this is a corporate desktop, Joe Employee has NO right to install cd burning tools, and even if they DID want to burn a cd, they could easily put the CD into the drive and use the built in Nautilus CD burning tool.
The fact remains, a corporate desktop is looked down to the point the end user can only do their work and that is it. The fact that they can’t install software or tweak the interface is a none issue when in the larger scheme of things, the whole point of them being there is to work.”
Joe Employee may not be allowed to tweak the desktop too much, though I know many companies allow some tweaking, however the company/government/school etc. that it is being deployed in might as is often the case. Most times you will never see a desktop being deployed in a large company without any additional software installed or any kinds of customizations. Even the chinese government are not actually buying the DEFAULT Linux distribution from Sun. They are instead basing their Linux desktoos on it, but it will be quite dfferent from the stock one.
In addition, have you EVER tried to seriously use Nautilus 2.2’s CD burning software? It is VERY VERY limited and quite buggy. Can you burn an iso with it, can you burn a dvd, no. Compared to Nero or K3b it is no good for any advanced task. Besides, this IS NOT ABOUT CD BURNING, it is about installing popular KDE/Qt applications in general. K3b is only one example of thousands. Just adding KDE libs to make this possible is all that was asked.
“Considering that their main aim is to get IT people to write in-house applications in Java, the IDE doesn’t really matter as Netbeans and Eclipse and quite good already.
From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window? What is so hard with creating something either like KDevelop or even something as basic as Qt Designer?”
Again this isn’t about SPECIFIC examples of KDE applications, K3b and Kdevelop are but a few examples. In addition, if productivity matters, the IDE matters.
Creating something like Kdevelop and Qt Designer is not an easy job and takes many man years. Also, there is nothing “basic” about Qt designer, it is a very powerful RAD application that helps you easily make a Qt interface for virtually any application.
> “Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?”
If you find the answer to that, let me know. Changing the sizes in the widget’s properties window doesn’t resize the actual widget in the test window. Terrible.
“Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?”
If you find the answer to that, let me know. Changing the sizes in the widget’s properties window doesn’t resize the actual widget in the test window. Terrible.
Funny enough, I couldn’t get an answer from the GLADE crowd. Actually being able to use GLADE must be the best kept secret in the opensource world.
Regarding the JDS, could you find out whether or not they’re using STSF or have simply stuck to the status quo of using xfs/fontconfig. If you have SUN contacts, could you find out what the time frame is for their Solaris (SPARC and x86) implementation of JDS.
“From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?”
You shouldn’t dismiss something just because you couldn’t figure it out after 5 minutes of tinkering. Glade takes a few hours to get used to. At first it is a bit confusing, no doubt. Once you get to grips with it, Glade does the job well enough. To answer your questions. With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the “real” widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widgets at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts. Pixel-oriented interface design is primitive and a thing of the past.
“Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?”
Hahahaha…lol. You don’t even know how to use Glade, yet you call it a nightmare. That’s like saying a Car sucks because you couldn’t figure out how to open the door. No disrespect man, but at least figure out how to use the said tool before critisizing it.
If you go to the help menu, there’s an option called “turbo start”. It’s a quick and easy way to acquiant yourself with glade. After using glade for two weeks or more, I’d like to know your assesment of it. Good Luck.
The reason I chose open source is that it provides me with choice. Nautilus takes away my choices. This is why, IMHO, KDE will always be preferred by power users and home users while the coporate suits will prefer to make employees use GNOME.
That’s the nice thing about Linux, we all get to choose for ourselves and use what we like.
Having said that, I have to agree with the opinion expressed about Konqueror. Nautilus looks clean, simple and it is simple to use, but it does a lot of things; including burning CD-Rs. Personally, I prefer the polished look of Gnome/Nautilus to KDE/Konqueror. That’s my opinion anyway, and fortunately, we are all entitled to those.
To comment on something on topic, I like the looks of Sun’s offering. I’m pretty happy with Debian, but I wouldn’t mind running this for a while to see what it’s like.
>>Even the chinese government are not actually buying the DEFAULT Linux distribution from Sun. They are instead basing their Linux desktoos on it, but it will be quite dfferent from the stock one.<<
Is that true? Where did you read that? I’m surprised to see this.
J
It appears to me that the battle lines have moved. SUN has taken over the commercial role that Redhat played on the desktop. But the field is no longer black and white. SuSE now also has Ximian (Gnome) blood – truly living up to it’s trademark – a cameleon. I predict that SUN will abandon SuSE/Novell and go it’s own way. If SuSE is forced to abandon KDE then I predict a new distro will popup. It shall be interesting. Also to see if Fedora can keep up.
Sometimes it is always good to start at the very beginning….because it’s a very good place to start:
Part 1 (Developing Gnome Apps with Glade)
http://writelinux.com/glade/
Part2 (Developing Gnome Apps with Glade and Anjuta)
http://eddy.writelinux.com/part2/
Enjoy!
btw, great review Eugenia. I’ll be sending the URL to our in-house Sun reps and see what they have to say as i am due to get a copy from them soon.
cheers
peter
“From the C/C++ stand point, I agree with you. Glade is a nightmare, how does one make the interface? how do you resize widgets and place them on the window? why is it every time I place a widget, it takes up the whole Window?”
You shouldn’t dismiss something just because you couldn’t figure it out after 5 minutes of tinkering. Glade takes a few hours to get used to. At first it is a bit confusing, no doubt. Once you get to grips with it, Glade does the job well enough.
True. I am sure, with enough learning, I can get used to a new way of doing something. I’m probably just used to doing something one way resulting in that any other approach used seems foreign to me, oh well.
To answer your questions. With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the “real” widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widgets at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts. Pixel-oriented interface design is primitive and a thing of the past.
True, just a little confusing since most of the programming I do is in Java and via a the eclipse editor; for some reason I could never get the interface builder to work properly. Netbeans is alright, however, its responsiveness is shocking to say the least. Lets hope that something is done about it because from a technical stand point, it isn’t too bad and with enough tweaking its responsiveness could be improved.
Eugenia, did you try entering applications:/// into Nautilus and seeing if the representation of the gnome menu appeared? Although start-here:/// may be eliminated (because it probably duplicates the functionality of Sun’s “My Computer” deal), applications:/// must still be there, I’d imagine.
Regardless, I’m sure this product has its bugs, and there is no real point to it, IMO. If I were a corporation looking for Microsoft replacement, I would definitely go with Xandros over this thing. Xandros packages Codeweavers products, makes the UI look and feel like Windows, and actually has some clever hacks to the system. I’d never use Xandros personally, but I could see a corporate manager who might like it, and plus, it’s built on Debian, and Debian, well, rocks.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031117/sfm143_1.html
The theme is not 100% uggly. However, Sun should aim more for a theme like Blue Curve, something thinner and more elegant.
Long day workers will get annoyed buy such an heavy theme, too many blending and embossed bars makes the eyes and mind get tired sooner.
This has been studied. For example, Microsoft knows it.
My 0.02 cents.
> where’s the java in JDS?
Sun is pushing Java Desktop System as its preferred platform for developing and running Java apps. It never claimed it was written in Java, although I wouldn’t be surprised if more Java apps were included in future releases.
“With glade you layout interfaces, instead of painting them. You place widgets by creating container widgets like tables which hold the “real” widgets. The advantage of this method is scalable interfaces. What do interfaces consist of? Text, icons and widgets. If you use svg icons you have completely scalable interfaces with Gnome *now*. E.g. you rarely have to worry if text in less concise languages than English will fit on your widgets. Gtk will take care of it and dynamically resize the widget
s at runtime. Users with bad eye-sight or running higher resolutions than normal can choose large systems fonts.”
This is inherently wrong. You are pretending as if this is something Qt Designer doe snot do and also spreading incorrect information.
It seems to me what you describe looks pretty like the use of QLayout and derivatives…
Whatever it looks like, Gtk *is* pixel-based. Have a look at classes : QVBox, QGrid, QLayout, QHBoxLayout, and so on… and of course you can use them in designer.
Also, Qt comes with default widget spacing, avoiding
having to specify it in “a million places” when coding
a UI.
When it comes to fitting non-Enlish text and i18n.
Have a quick look at Qt Linquist. You do _not_ need to
be a programmer to be a Qt translator.
What GLADE is doing is nothing special and neither is the design, from my experience with both, Qt Designer rules hands down.
What is the performance like of this package? I’ve got SO6 and it’s a whole lot faster than Open Office 1.0.* or 1.1. Yet I hear them saying SO7 is based on OOo, which is not a good performer on my system.
Besides the fact that Qt does the same thing too in a much simpler way, it has had this since the 1.x days.
oesn’t everyone have an application that creates XML for interfaces these days?
You can even evaluate those at runtime if you want.That’s part of what KJSEmbed can do for you: Click some forms. glue it with JavaScript, be done. No need to compile it
It will be the best brandname Linux distribution and with Sun Microsystems technology it will be very secure and fast.
I am recommending it for everyone.
It’s really amazing. Height years ago SUN had a desktop strategy based on the Openstep desktop and development environment (which is now used by Mac OS X) and was about to market it when they scrapped it in favor of Java, that was supposed to give them something better. Height years latter, they come with an hideous “Java desktop” which is not even written in Java for the most part of it.
In addition, have you EVER tried to seriously use Nautilus 2.2’s CD burning software? It is VERY VERY limited and quite buggy. Can you burn an iso with it, can you burn a dvd, no. Compared to Nero or K3b it is no good for any advanced task. Besides, this IS NOT ABOUT CD BURNING, it is about installing popular KDE/Qt applications in general. K3b is only one example of thousands. Just adding KDE libs to make this possible is all that was asked.
Burning to a CD in Linux requires UDF writing, which is experimental, hence, it is not supported by Nautilus CD write until it becomes a standard “feature” with Linux.
As for installing KDELibs, that fact remains, and I re-emphasise this fact, the end users aren’t going to install applications from outside the software supported by SUN.
Employees don’t install software, and the likelihood for the IT department finding that the applications already included don’t meet the requirements, they would have never chosen to go with the JDS platform in the first place.
The whole point of JDS is to have a working desktop out of the box not requiring extra tweaking and so forth.