Solaris and CDE
Dave Astheimer
Anybody installed Solaris CDE as their first-line user interface?
Do the deskset tools work as advertised? What gives?
Dave
Klaus Lindemann
Well, I did not install CDE, but I use it, and so far I intent to keep it.
Don't know what Sun advertised, but I use it primarily because I can
configure it to behave much like vtwm, which I used before. I also like
the fact that it is much more similar to Windows (yes, I also use PC)
then vtwm or OpenWindows. Can't say much about the Filemanager or
Application Manager. The image viewer seems to be a copy from the
OpenWindows image viewer. What I did not like so far is the way the
front panel is configured. Too many files in too many directories may
or may not have an influence on how the front panel looks. It's too
complicated for the average user to deal with it. And certain aspects
seems to be fixed. I could not figure out how to make the panel
display small icons instead of large one, or how to shrink the buttons
which take you to the different workspaces. Basically, I want to make
the whole thing smaller. If anyone has an idea how to achieve this,
please let me know. Of course, if you really don't like the front panel,
you can disable the the whole thing, switch between workspaces with the
keyboard and use the Workspace Popup Menu to run applications.
Last but not least I use it because I hope that finally Sun has
a user interface, which is also supported by IBM and HP, so it has
a chance to stay, unlike SunView or OpenLook, which are dead or dying.
Klaus Lindemann (li...@iai.kfk.de)
Dan D.S. Yu
: In article <463ve5$k...@everest.pinn.net>, Dave Astheimer <d...@pinn.net> writes:
: > Howdy ...
: >
: > Anybody installed Solaris CDE as their first-line user interface?
: > Do the deskset tools work as advertised? What gives?
: >
: > Dave
I installed CDE 1.0 on Solaris 2.5 x86 on someone's machine at
work. It seems fairly stable, and I've always prefered Motif
over OpenLook styles, etc. The default terminal emulator
(dtterm) is fine, although I still prefer a plain old-fashioned
MIT Xterm (which, of course, can still be used).
The one thing that prevented me from actually installing it on
my machine is this: According to the pkg locations and various
readme files, it seems like the Motif runtimes included with
CDE are 'not complete'. I may be confused about this (and if
so, please let me know), but I currently use Motif 1.2 and
good old mwm on my Solaris x86 machine (off the Solaris SDK),
and given that we do a bit of Motif development, I wanted
to ensure that I had a fully 'motif compliant' system.
The one thing that did pique my interest was an app that installs
with the CDE (in 'developer' install) that appeared to be a
reasonably nice Motif GUI builder. I didn't use it to any great
degree, but it's hard to find PC UNIXs that come with a bonus
GUI builder.
--
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Daniel Yu
[ds...@holonet.net]
"Sometimes it's damned hard to tell the dancer from the dance."
-Roger Zelazny
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