We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I’m a huge fan of CDE – I’ve even dedicated an article to it – so I’m excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later.
What is the Common Desktop Environment? From my earlier article on CDE:
CDE was announced in 1993, as a joint development effort by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, and Sun. CDE was part of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE), an effort by the major UNIX vendors of the time to counter the UNIX wars which were basically holding UNIX hostage. The big UNIX guys realised that Microsoft was making strong inroads into the traditional UNIX space (workstations and data centers), and that something needed to be done to make sure that UNIX would be able to stand the major competition they were about to face.COSE had several areas of focus, such as networking, graphics, multimedia, object technology, and many other things; they wanted to ensure interoperability between the various UNIX offerings in the world.
Sadly, CDE was closed source, and as such, never gained much traction beyond big-iron UNIX systems like Solaris and HP-UX. The open source world focussed on KDE and GNOME instead, and while Xfce was inspired by CDE in its early days, it started carving out its own path later on.
So, yes, it might be too late, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less cool and awesome. “The Common Desktop Environment project is proud to announce the open sourcing of the Common Desktop Environment a.k.a. CDE,” the project writes, “CDE was long the defacto standard among workstation vendors which enabled ease of software porting and training. It is still in use by Solaris (up to version 10), HP-UX, AIX and OpenVMS.”
Motif, the widget toolkit used by CDE, will also be released as open source, but since there are still a few legal issues to work out there, this will have to wait. In the meantime, the project decided to move ahead with CDE, since it can be built using Open Motif anyway.
Why should you care? Well, most importantly, while CDE is outdated and not exactly what you’d call pretty, its usability is of a kind you don’t see anymore these days. For me, the core quality of CDE is that it never does something without without the user initiating the action. From my earlier CDE article:
CDE might be lacking in the bling department, but it more than makes up for in the usability department, or, as I like to call it in CDE, the common sense department. CDE has achieved something that no other desktop environment has ever given me: a complete and total dedication to expected behaviour – or, put differently, a complete absence of unexpected behaviour. It is hard to put into words, but when you are using CDE, you are rarely, if ever, surprised by the results of your actions.In addition to that, CDE never goes out and do things without your consent. It does not bother you with pop-ups, (modal) dialog windows, or more of that nonsense. It is focused on just one thing: serving you, The User. CDE will not do things without your full permission, something so many other desktop environments do constantly. Where Explorer, KDE, GNOME, and the Finder are more like cats, CDE is more like a dog. And even though I am a total cat person, I really like CDE for it.
I’m very interested to see what the future has in store for CDE – I’m hoping they maintain the UI behaviour, but will move to making things a little prettier. And when they do decide to add new features, I hope they won’t harm the spirit of CDE – although I do realise concessions may have to be made.
In any case, I wish the project lots of good luck!
I used CDE for years in a Sun Blade workstation running Solaris 8 and I loved it. It was really nice and fast.
I think that many ideas from CDE are cool even today, iconification of running applications is one of them (similar to Windows 3.1 but better).
Unfortunately GNOME became the “de facto” standard of the majority of unix desktops (Solaris included) and CDE didn’t get any major improvement since then.
I hope open source put CDE back at the top. 🙂
I always liked CDE, and this is positive news. It’s been over a decade since you could purchase it for Linux/FreeBSD. There has recently been an effort to create an open-source clone, which has been decently supported on FreeBSD.
Regarding the UI, CDE is a stable environment, and I always thought iconify to desktop was superior to a taskbar. If I could design a modern desktop, it would largely resemble the CDE layout, with live thumbnails of the minimized apps as opposed to fixed icons.
I don’t know how much traction this will gain, except for nostalgic users. The beauty is, we have the option to keep using it.
Hi, I am the documentation lead for the CDE project.
The people behind OpenCDE are involved with CDE as well. A FreeBSD port is in progress.
There is an issue with dthello that is making it impossible for it to run on other distributions other than Debain Squeeze and Ubuntu. It’s related to rpcbind and it’s being worked on.
I’m curious, why it was released now? The petitioning worked? (from http://www.marutan.net/cde/ seems there was some decent amount of good will; hm, and I just stumbled on it recently from http://www.marutan.net/rpcemu/ ) The Open Group largely lost interest, and threw it out there for those still wanting to use it and/or maintaining older apps?
My first experience with it was on an AIX workstation donated to the IT lab when I was in college. I was one of the few students with prior *nix experience so the lab manager asked me to help him with setting it up. It was a blast! Until then I had only worked with FVWM, blackbox and twm and I loved CDE’s approach to desktop management.
I suppose that’s why I took so well to Xfce when I switched to it from Gnome so many years later.
Question: As someone who never used CDE back in the day I have to ask, other than nostalgia of course…why would anyone care now?
After all it isn’t like there isn’t tons and tons of DEs to choose from now in FOSS, your KDEs, GNOMEs, XFCE, E17, LXDE,JWM, etc, you have so many choices and all of them frankly are so much better supported and so far ahead i just have to ask what the point is of wasting time and resources on something so…well old.
So while i’m all for there being more stuff to play with I just don’t get the point of trying to bring truly ancient history back from the dead. To me it always made about as much sense as trying to run a new machine with Win95, we’ve just come so far from those days other than strictly nostalgia I just don’t get it.
You might as well ask why there are so many people using FVWM? Again very ancient desktop.
I personally fr example have turned all my Windows 7 installations tio basically Windows 2000 desktops. All themes and other bling off.
“so many” doesn’t mean what you think it means…
Edited 2012-08-14 00:03 UTC
It was coherently designed, well-documented and almost entirely bug free. Not unlike OpenVMS, which is where I used CDE.
Yeah, it’s ugly as sin, but managed to stay out of the way let you do your work, which I consider a high compliment for a desktop environment — or an operating system.
Does this mean I’ll use it now? No — XFCE, which has a lot more mindshare, does the job for me, and there are many GTK apps I would miss (e.g., Firefox). Perhaps CDE should have gone open a long time ago to have any hope …
Pretty sure you’d still be able to run GTK+ applications, just like you can run KDE applications from Gnome or XFce
Perhaps, but what would I gain then by using CDE, in exchange for the visual and configuration inconsistency?
Years ago, I had some customers insisting on having their well-known CDE environment “somehow” on their new Linux and BSD workstations. I ended up installing XFCE 3 for them, and with some tweaking (especially colors and some menu editing), I was told that that was exactly what they’ve looked for. The system was later on changed by replacing lots of workstations with thin clients (using X11 networking sessions). That solution was “exactly like” what they knew from their former Solaris environment, even though they did use quite different programs (leaving XFCE to serve as window manager and program launcher).
Sadly, this solution seems to be impossible now as XFCE 3 isn’t supported anymure (due to the death of Gtk 1), and Xfce 4 (using Gtk 2) is much more “too different”. I still have a 300 MHz system running BSD with XFCE 3, office programs and multimedia stuff. Unbreakable. 🙂
There is a certain elegance to having rock solid system that still gets the job done. Whizbang features just get in the way.
This is something from the *BSD/commercial Unix world that I miss in the Linux ecosystem.
I’ve never used CDE and I’ll probably stick with LXDE but I’m still very glad to see this and, if I can ever find the time, I’ll probably play around with it just for curiosity’s sake.
It’ll also be very nice if the planned LGPL release of Motif prompts Gentoo maintainers (who, last I checked, consider LessTif too much work for too little gain) to offer a fully libre way to run Motif-based apps like GNU DDD.
W8, how did an application using non-free toolkit end up under GNU umbrella?!
I’m interested in knowing if there are more users that feels the same way Thom does, telling that CDE feels much like a dog instead of a cat. I may try this on VirtualBox just to get the feeling, I wonder if it will be outstanding…
For being alpha quality software, it’s pretty stable. I use it as my desktop DE now. There are are some quirks and not everything works (dtcreate, dtappbuilder and probably a few other things).
Of course the colors are a bit garish but I created a palette how to so you can change that.
I wonder if it will take off now, or at least be picked up by Debian as an official package in the repository. I think Squeeze just froze, so unfortunately it probably won’t happen for another two years or so, when the next, next version is released.
Still, very cool. I’m interested to see how it turns out and develops, and any specialty Linux distros that are based on it. I’ve only used it briefly a couple times when I was playing around with Solaris (still owned by Sun at the time).
Squeeze has been the official Stable release for years now. It froze in 2010. Wheezy, the next release, is already frozen, so we won’t see Debian Stable with CDE in Debian-main until 2014 or so.
Whoops, I get Debian’s weird release names mixed up all the time. That’s what I actually meant.
I swear, I should just refer to them by version number… it’s a lot harder to mix up. Doesn’t help that with Debian’s long release cycles, it’s not uncommon to run across news items on two or three different versions of the distro (stable, oldstable, testing), and people usually use the codenames instead of version numbers.
They are easy. Debian Squeeze is the current stable version. Wheezy is the testing version, the next stable version. Sid is the unstable version.
Yes, easy once you memorize them. But easy to mix up once a new version is around the corner. And several years later, it’s a lot harder to remember exactly what codename a specific release was, but again, the version number is a different story.
Debian’s Toy Story code names are a lot easier than Ubuntu’s even wackier ones though, I’ll give ’em that.
Edited 2012-08-07 02:11 UTC
If the names are unclear, you can always use the title; stable, testing or unstable. Debian Testing just froze a week or so back which means it’s basically in Beta working towards becoming the new Stable version.
Saves you worrying about version numbers and nick-names.
CDE was the second *nix GUI I ever used extensively (Afterstep on Red Hat 5 being the first), and was the first I used on an actual Unix (SCO Unixware, baby!)
This news pleases me. I still like CDE, and I’m anxious to see what direction it goes now.
I first used CDE on AIX workstation and really fell in love with the color themes. Specially the terminal like this one. Haven’t found the color themes for other DE-s and now I finally have an opportunity to try it on Linux Absolutely beautiful for me
http://www.pexus.com/ScreenShots/snglwnd.jpg
Curiously, though I never used it, I still have this “that’s a GUI for Real Work(tm)” perception ingrained in my mind …maybe from ~films (non-horrible ones, WRT to depicting how computers looks like), or photos of scientific labs & experiments.
If you like the colours, there is a GTK3 theme now out for integration with HP-UX
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/HP-UXMotif+%28Gtk3+and+G…
Edit: It also includes gtk2 theme.
Edited 2012-08-06 21:20 UTC
Have used CDE on both AIX and Solöaris and I really didn’t like the default color theme on Solaris but AIX was perfect. Specially the terminal colors. Have used above mentioned screenshot many times to pick the colors and make my terminals look the same.
This decision is very good for the open source community and CDE fans.
Me, I’ll pass as I never liked it, specially because on the enterprise 15 years ago there was no other choice.
While at home I could enjoy Afterstep, Window Maker and Enlightment, at work I had to use the dull CDE.
I understand it is also a widget toolkit. Are there any relevant applications based on it?
Motif is the widget toolkit and currently it is still not yet open sourced, but there is OpenMotif and actually that is used to build CDE currently.
Here seems to be a list of apps using Motif toolkit: http://www.openmotif.org/wiki/random
Edited 2012-08-06 07:46 UTC
Looks like OpenMotif (which really just seems to be one of Motif distribution methods) is also not yet open sourced…
Motif will be on sourced in a few months.
Yes Motif, which has functions that rival Win32 in the amount of parameters.
It makes somewhat sense, Motif was supposed to mimic Windows’ look/feel, I guess they wanted the behavior to be similar down to the API level…
What?!
Motif is older than Windows.
Nope, Presentation Manager predates Motif by a few years. Motif was developed as a partnership between several vendors (HP and Digital mainly) and Microsoft, the goal was to have a consistent look and feel between Windows/OS2 and Unix machines. At least that was the “theory,” the end result was a dreadful mess of a toolkit.
I think it is ironic to see people praising Motif/CDE, given how much it kinda stunk during its heyday.
Edited 2012-08-06 21:07 UTC
From the Motif FAQ: Motif is a widely-accepted set of user interface guidelines developed by the Open Software Foundation (OSF) around 1989 which specifies how an X Window System application should “look and feel”.
From Wikipedia: The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1988 under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 to create an open standard for an implementation of the UNIX operating system. The foundation’s original sponsoring members were Apollo Computer, Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nixdorf Computer, and Siemens AG.
While Presentation Manager (1988) predates Motif with a year, the first usable Windows version (3.0) only came in 1990.
Sigh…
From the wikipedia article:
“Motif’s operation was designed to correspond closely with the then-familiar Microsoft Windows and OS/2’s Presentation Manager interfaces, and Microsoft played a key role in designing the original style guide.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_(widget_toolkit)
Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, BTW. “Usable” is a very subjective metric BTW, and irrelevant to the timeline. The point still stands the look and feel of Windows/Presentation manager predates motif by a few years.
Edited 2012-08-08 23:49 UTC
Could this be ported to Wayland?
Yes, if you can get OpenMotif to run on Weyland first.
And it will probably do so in a near future, since this toolkit is opensource, it is relatively simple (against GTK or QT) and has a quite active community.
The e-mail about the news was quite unexpected but nonetheless very good! Signed the petition a few years ago, glad to see it worked. VirtualBox, behold!
go CDE!
It was a long time ago but if memory servers one CDE application (on Solaris) wasn’t network transparent, when you use X11 you get used to export display as you like so I was quite annoyed when I discovered that this CDE application didn’t work as expected with export display..
So my question is: is CDE network transparent?
Good news, although I remember being shocked when I was forced to change to CDE from olwm.
A bit strange anyway:
– The download is an alpha version
– I have not found any reference in the OpenGroup web page to this new license status.
– The domain cdesktopenv.org is owned by Peter Howkins, who also owns the domain http://www.marutan.net with some petitions to opensource CDE http://www.marutan.net/cde
The license status is in the source. The Open Group isn’t the fastest with announcements. It should be up today. It’ll be here:
http://blog.opengroup.org/
“So far I’ve built and run CDE on the following:
…
5. Debian Squeeze 6.0 ARMv5el, Linux 3.1.9+ (Raspberry Pi)” ( http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/ )
Me gusta
I’ll try a build on Raspbian asap.
It takes about 5 hours to build on the Pi.
It’s almost like having Windows 95 or Mac OS 8 open sourced today. No real benefit, just a pile of closed, outdated and buggy source. Open source / free software paradigm is not a magic bullet to rescue dead projects. You can’t expect your closed source project will be developed at no cost by others right after you have no more money to develop it / there is no real interrest in it, etc.
I actually find it quite pathetic, though it depends on the reasons this code was made open.
This can only have a sentimental value, not a real one. You could try to build on top of that code, but it would probobly take rediculous amount of hours to make use of that anyway.
Free software is about real benefit to other people: this doesn’t bring any real benefit. Open source is all about the method: and here it does apply. But so what? does it even have any sense?
I’m sorry to be so critical, but I just can’t see good intentions there.
Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it doesn’t have good ideas. You reference Mac OS 8/9 – for me, that interface, Platinum, is miles and miles ahead of whatever UI disaster Apple is using now. Platinum was designed with usability in mind, it was consistent and logical. Mac OS X, on the other hand, is Microsoft BOB with garish skeuomorphic crap and incredibly inconsistent.
Old != bad. Platinum > Aqua.
Well, of course old doesn’t mean bad. I myself am a huge fan of many old projects, like BeOS, OpenVMS. But that’s just a different thing and different history. BeOS died and Haiku OS was born as an open source [from the start], and OpenVMS … was never *open*, so there’s no real problem anyway.
I would be more than pleased to know why exactly did they open their sources. This would give us valuable information and … their motives.
Might I add I don’t try to take your joy away, CDE users! I can imagine you really love it and I have nothing against it. I’m just being suspicious … or critical if you will.
This begs the question: What then are the good ideas in the specific case of CDE?
No, it doesn’t: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
They pretty much all suck these days – for me Mac OS X is the best of the worst and that isn’t saying much for any of them to be quite frank. Having used IRIX owns desktop along with CDE on Solaris I would sooner the effort go into reviving and adding functionality to CDE than what seems to be the wasted effort by the two major desktops hauling along the monstrous memory hogging crap they call ‘features’ or stripping out preferences for the sake of ‘ease of use’ aka GNOME.
What would I like to see?
1) CDE based configuration tools – networking configuration tools, video card settings etc.
2) Getting the major software titles like Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and so on to use OpenMotif – get some consistency.
3) Porting it to Wayland but ideally I’d like to see something better than Wayland so that other operating systems aren’t left out in the cold – yes, I am a FreeBSD fan.
4) Niceties of modern desktops such as anti-aliased fonts etc.
So basically you just want to keep reinventing the wheel….
No, we already have a wheel – it’s called CDE but the children are hell bent on going their separate ways re-inventing wheel with all the faults of the original design.
CDE is not a wheel you want to use as a foundation for anything, it was a mess of a desktop environment. It basically was the pinnacle of “designed by committee.” IMO CDE was one of the reasons why commercial Unix workstations went the way of the DoDo.
I think a lot of people’s views in this thread about CDE are tragically warped by the lens of nostalgia…
UNIX workstations died not because of the lack of commonality but the fact that SGI, SUN and IBM couldn’t get it through their thick skull that no one is going to pay $15,000 for a workstation when a ‘good enough’ workstation running Windows on an x86 chip could do the job quite nicely. Sorry to break the bad news but the world runs on ‘good enough technology’ and not the best, most sexy, most awesome pinnacle of engineering in a particular field. Sorry but had the UNIX workstation pricing dropped at the same rate as the PC and reached parity people would have been able to look over the imperfections just as people were able to look over the imperfections of Windows NT and Linux in the early days.
Thing is, any parity in price-drops (or, more generally, in price/performance ratios) wasn’t even really achievable for traditional UNIX workstations. Meanwhile, the economies of scale (of that “good enough” approach) afforded the PC working itself upwards, eventually surpassing the “pro” hardware/software.
Joining the PC world did seem to help the only remaining prominent *nix workstation, Mac Pro, for some time …but it’s still visibly slipping away as of late, uprooted also by more traditional PC OEMs.
Platinum was familiar to YOU, that does not meant that it is superior to Aqua.
One could make the case that given the significant increases in user base Apple experienced after the introduction of Aqua, whereas Platinum was stagnant at best, that it would seem that people prefer Aqua (OSX) to Platinum (Sytem 8/9).
Hahahahahahaha!! Such a joker!! Did you ever use Microsoft Bob? If you think OS X is like Microsoft Bob, I doubt it.
Please don’t mix graphical representations the general of real life in isolated apps with Bob. They are far removed. I find OS X far less offensive than the Crayola XP interface. The default control panel was fcuking insulting. The window dressing actually messed with the physical size of Windows and broke apps that made assumptions about the width of the title bar. For me, Windows 7 is every much as Crayola, and Windows 8 and the UI formerly known as Metro is more of the same. Simply depressing. I’d take the Windows 95/2000 classic theme over the god awful XP/7/8 themes any day of the week.
Well with Windows you can easily turn them off… (and control panel stuff is one click away, button visible in the same window).
Good luck changing what’s messed up like that in OSX.
I think the main point is that there’s so much code out there designed specifically for certain horribly outdated systems that is near impossible to port to something modern. The more older stuff that gets open sourced, the easier it is to manage a transition to running on newer operating environments.
The need for compatibility with one program often keeps entire networks back
Assuming the developers are able to make a leaving out of it.
Just because it’s old doesn’t mean you throw it away. There are many fans of CDE. The code is open, who knows what will happen?
I’m not sure what the problem is, it’s not “closed”, as it’s now Open Source. I’m not sure how it’s “outdated” as I use it all the time, and I don’t know of anything it does not do, that it really needs to. Sure there are features I’d like, but that’s the case for all desktops. I don’t find it buggy, I use it every day, I see more glitches in Windows 7 and Mac OS X, and I sure as hell see more in Android.
Any real benefit? Maybe not to you, maybe not to me either, even as a user of CDE every day.
With respect, I think you make a lot of assumptions just because it’s old. CDE is very solid, and runs quick. It’s not a big “look at me” desktop with 3D effects or “dashboards” nobody wants. It does it’s minimal job very well and stays out of the way.
In my experience, older software seems to be somewhat *less* buggy. It’s probably due to a smaller code base (less code, fewer bugs), longer product cycle for stamping out issues, and pretty much no features added in a hurry because it’s in fashion at the time.
By all means, try out CDE and decide it’s crap, but again, with respect, you’re stating a lot of problems with CDE which do not exist.
Nah, we mostly remember the relatively few positive examples (and those which survived, which still can be used; long-maintained hence, duh, decently debugged) – while forgetting tons of negative ones.
Similar effects with the popular myths about old films and music, or the general “old times were better” …we just don’t remember so well all the crap that was pushed, how the nice stuff wasn’t so available and discoverable (a’la imdb or last.fm)
As someone who is still using CDE on Solaris 10 at work I read this article with a smile on my face, but I don’t see anything particularly useful that might come out of this.
Is there anyone out there interested to do something with the code. Improve it? Make it look modern? Or at least make not look like an ugliest DE in the history*. Probably not.
*I am not complaining about the ugliness of CDE. It is a great, stable DE, that keeps my sessions working flawlessly for weeks or months with zero issues. It is not supposed to look pretty, and I am so used to look at those ugly windows borders, I would probably refuse to use any modern version for the simple reason of “it being too pretty”. Ugliness of CDE gives me confidence of its stability :-))
Didn’t think it ugly at all, not saying it couldn’t have been improved but at the time I wished it worked on windows as well. Not sure I wouldn’t now.
It could be improved with antialiased fonts and UTF-8 support, which are all available in OpenMotif.
I think that would be a plus in usability without introducing any bloat.
There is experiment support for that in CDE right now:
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/FontsWithXFT/
Well, true XFT support in OpenMotif requires more work than setting a couple of resource files ;-(
I have done this in my software, here are the screenshots for choosing XFT fonts for the application
http://www.arahne.si/images/stories/news/new_version_ArahWeave/inte…
http://www.arahne.si/images/stories/news/new_version_ArahWeave/thai…
If somebody needs code for this please contact me.
Also, the OpenMotif was converted for XFT and all widgets support renderTables. But third party widgets are not automagically converted just by using OpenMotif. So various dt widgets will probably need some work in order to support XFT and UTF-8.
It is “experimental support”. It may or may not work. Obviously in your case, it didn’t work. Its a requested feature but not a high priority right now.
I too have used CDE on Solaris and HP-UX, love it, and hope to see a Linux distro that makes this it’s default interface. This is exciting news!
=O)
Edited 2012-08-06 09:59 UTC
What I didn’t like about CDE was that you couldn’t have access to the miniaturized apps or to the dock if you had a maximized window. I am sure some keyboard shortcut exists for both, but it should be an option, because most people don’t know shortcuts during the first days the use a GUI (if they ever learn them). It has to be intuitive.
Edited 2012-08-06 11:44 UTC
Just registered on OSnews so I can comment on this good news! I’ve used CDE and found it very usable on my UNIX boxes (Solaris) in the past.
I’m looking forward to seeing a few modern additions to CDE. My main wish is simply the implementation of anti-aliased fonts and a bit of cosmetic tweaking – but please, not to the extent of most modern DEs.
There is experimental support for XFT:
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/FontsWithXFT/
Great! Thank you for the link.
I preferred OpenLook on Sun workstations 🙁
before it was replaced by CDE and Motif.
I was in the same boat. I was very used to running olvwm and then sun switched over to CDE. It was a bear trying to configure CDE to act more like openlook. Even worse was all space wasted on the desktop FOR the desktop when I cared first and foremost about maximizing my code windows (which I did with openlook).
This is great news! I think CDE is a fabulous interface.
Thom, I quote that article you wrote to my coworkers all the time. I love saying “CDE is one of the best user interfaces ever made” and seeing the reaction on their faces.
I wonder if the OpenCDE project will continue their work. EDIT: …and then I read the comments above. ^_^
Edited 2012-08-06 13:41 UTC
I’m learning C/C++ at the moment, so I’m looking for something to get my teeth into, this looks like the project for me. Won’t promise anything at all.
Never thought such a high profile commercial product could ever get open sourced. I’d like to see a distro with that option soon.
It will save me from buying Exceed too. Darn metro fonts are hard to get on most linux.
Edited 2012-08-06 15:37 UTC
You weren’t looking around much – Java, Star Office. Arguably also Qt, Blender, Duke3D and id engines, Netscape, Sim City.
And in the OS or DE categories, where CDE is – definitely CP/M, GEM, Symbian, Solaris.
Yeah, open sourcing mostly didn’t really help the last four and/or it was done when they were long past their time. Still, kinda neat with CDE, and should be useful at least in ~legacy scenarios.
A FreeBSD port is in progress. Its our biggest request by far.
I have very fond memories of motif and CDE on my uVAXes…
Motif is the key, IMHO. It was the most common tool kit that people used on UNIX gui apps. I’m sure some will benefit having it available for free. Lesstif almost always worked but there were a couple issues. If nothing else, it would make updating those older apps easier.
This is quite a dream coming true here, at least for me. Now I can use CDE even on the go on my laptop. I’m enjoying it right now, it works wonderful.
I had to build it sans documentation on Debian Squeeze, because it would stop with an error while generating the docs for Appmanager, AFAICT. On CentOS the doc was not the problem, but the whole story with the RPC implementation not being compatible.
I always liked CDE, especially the configuration via Xresources made a lot more sense to me than the XML stuff the gnome folks are using.
Keep it simple.
This is EXCELLENT news.
CDE was is and will be the best GUI i’ve layed my eyes and hands upon. I was waiting for this for about a decade. Good move !! Now to see a release for ubuntu/mint 🙂
This is really great news!
My last CDE experience was with the TriTeal CDE (TDE actually) that came (optional) with the official RedHat Linux 4.2 (around 1998).
So, the petition to open source CDE and Motif can be almost closed! <http://www.marutan.net/cde/>
🙂
I love CDE! ♪♫♩
Edited 2012-08-06 23:08 UTC
i’ve been waiting on this for years. i use to mock up xfce to look like it on linux, but only was able to use actual cde on solaris.
the article says you can download it for ubuntu and debian, but i can only find the source.
Its not great wording. What it means is that the code compiles and runs on Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu.
Does CDE use the same mechanism as OpenCDE to mount stuff?
i.e. a script that runs setuid root? http://devio.us/~kpedersen/forums/viewtopic.php?id=685
If so…
a) Eww
b) It won’t completely work on modern UNIXes
Nope, No code from OpenCDE is being used. OpenCDE is deprecated and it’s developer is part of the CDE project now.
I’m pretty sure scripts can’t be setuid, at least that’s the case on OpenBSD.
Nice to see three platforms under WIP list: Debian Sid (PPC), FreeBSD and my personal favorite linux of all times – Slackware.
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatforms/
Edited 2012-08-07 10:12 UTC
Besides FreeBSD, right now Debian Sid is our most requested port.
Maybe IBM could take the hint, and release some technologies that was used in OS/2. System Object Model (SOM), DSOM, Workplace Shell, OS/2 for the PowerPC etc. I’m pretty sure many developers would love to see those in the open source world too!
I don’t know that IBM could even if they wanted to do so atm. Last I checked OS/2 is still active in the form of eComstation and I’d imagine there’s some agreements in place that would complicate the code release.
That would be nice, but OS/2 is still a commercial product under the guise of eCommstation. I think they would have a problem with IBM releasing those technologies. Then again, IBM might not even have the rights to the code anymore. I don’t remember the terms of the sale, but I think releasing code would have to come from eCommstation.
In an ideal world, we would not need money or patents.
But since we don’t live in an utopia, and OS/2 is pretty much a dead platform long surpassed technically. And even though it may be of great interest to a few dedicated enthusiasts…. the cost of the legal/patent review process for the OS/2 codebase is not trivial, and probably not worth it for IBM. Unless hobbyist could raise some capital and offer IBM (or whoever holds the copyrights now) some grease to sweeten the deal.
Update: someone just a sent tarball full of patches for FreeBSD in. In theory it will work. Details later.
I wish they could have done it a long time ago. It has not really received any love in a decade. The good thing about that is that it hasn’t been cluttered up with constantly changing glamour libraries or tied with KDE/QT/GTK/Gnome crap.
What I would like to see is all the DT applications working, with perhaps the backends upgraded to support current API’s. In other words I’d like to be able to use the DT calendar and mail apps with Google services. I also noticed that the dtterm termcap was not liked by vi on Ubuntu 10.10.
The only other thing that would be nice is a native looking system tray, since so many applications use them and nearly every window manager and desktop provides that functionality. Better yet, have dockable apps just create a desktop icon like minimized programs do. I temporarily installed stalonetray so I could access the NetworkManager applet to connect to wifi.
Nice effort. Hope they keep working on getting it stabilized and fully functional. It works surprisingly well on my netbook. The windows don’t open extended beyond the screen, which is something Gnome and many other applications still can’t figure out for some reason.
Thanks, Open Group. Looking forward to the release of Motif as well. Speaking of which, check out this Motify GUI from the Wayback Machine: http://www.breadbox.com/geoscreens/motif.gif
Ah, the good old days …
Jeff
Nice you mentioned it. I’ve been using GeoWorks Ensemble 3.0 (not sure about the version number, but it was before NDO or BBE) on DOS many years ago, still being impressed on how they did get things done that today’s “Windows” is (natively) still incapable of, like real drag & drop, or pinning menues.
For screenshts and comparison visit “The GUI Gallery”:
http://toastytech.com/guis/geos12.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/sol.html
Isn’t it right time for this: http://www.change.org/petitions/silicon-graphics-international-corp… ?
After seeing the lackluster response to opensolaris, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are more then enough free unix variants out there already.
linux/bsd(s)/minix/opensolaris/darwin …
For devs who do this kind of work.. likely they already are apart of one of these projects… if thats the kind of thing their into.
Doubtless it would be cool to have irix running on new hardware but getting a new mips workstation might not be so easy, porting irix to X86 is possible but would need a big dedicated effort I’d expect.
On the otherhand – the userland may be able to be ported to other OS’s but at this point Im not sure what the benifit would be really.
My guess is the people who own IRIX (rackspace?) know this and the cost of going over a huge codebase and getting permissions from various copyright owners is too prohibitive to be worth the effort.
He’s talking about the Indigo Magic desktop environment, not IRIX itself.
That said, the reason OpenSolaris failed miserably has more to do with the braindead decisions with licensing and general lack of support from Sun/Oracle than the OS itself. I’m sure if they’d gone GPL or BSD style licensing there would’ve been a great deal more interest.
The petition is about to open IRIX’s desktop environment and underlying things, if possible, like 4dwm window manager, not about opening IRIX OS itself.