Glynn Foster wrote: > Hey, > > Garrett D'Amore wrote: > >> I realize that a lot of focus is being spent on JDS 3/gnome, and that >> this is largely a good thing for the end user. >> >> However, I am interested, also, in having a "lightweight" desktop >> environment, suitable for use by system administrators to access gui >> tools on machines that are otherwise not normally used as a desktop. >> (Think of an NFS server somewhere. It is useful to be able to run smc >> and such tools, without paying the full price of Gnome.) >> >> The requirements for such an environment would not be dissimilar to >> those required for graphical suninstall -- a basic window manager like >> mwm or dtwm would be adequate. I'd be even happier if we got something >> like xfce4, which was open source, into such as an environment (but then >> again, I use xfce4 on my primary desktop). >> > > Sounds good to me - maybe it's something you'd like to consider championing? > While it's probably a good business case for Sun to support any more desktops > than we currently do [1], we could consider doing something like this in the > companion CD? > > > Glynn > > [1] And after CDE moves away, I'd far rather capture that space and reduce > the number of CD's in a Solaris install than add another desktop env >
I have no idea if I can champion anything at all. But see my earlier post with respect to "environments". At this point I would be strongly in favor of picking up fvwm a basic Window Manger (not a whole desktop environment) and putting it in the basic install (the same place that twm is found) so that suninstall etc. can make use of it. I would _not_ like this on a separate companion CD, because at that point it loses most of its advantages (sysadmins can't "count on it being there", and Sun can't use it for suninstall, etc.) Of course, exchanging CDE for fvwm is a big win. Fvwm introduces no significant dependencies, and (on my sparc machine) is 17.9MB on disk. On the same system /usr/dt/ is about 80MB. A lot of that 17.9MB could certainly be removed if we don't want to offer all of Fvwm's features. (Certainly, we don't need them for our "limited configuration", but it would make Fvwm more generally useful for end user desktops.) -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191
