Some thoughts about where we are and where we are going... I believe OpenSolaris builds are the best place to run with a GNOME 2.16 environment. Note that we are in the middle of integrating HAL with GNOME, so I'd probably recommend waiting until after Nevada build 53 before when 2.16 goes in. Otherwise, you can use 2.14, which mostly works aside from the media programs that depend on HAL (CD burning, ripping). You can also use Nevada build 51 with the vermillion-devel builds, but this is less supported than official OpenSolaris builds, I am sure.
Note that early next year virtual terminals are going into Nevada, which will further take solaris a leap forward in terms of desktop usability. This will allow GDM to become the default login program, which should be a nice change (though I'm biased and been working on it for a long time now). In between now and then, I'd also expect the GNOME stack to get more solid. Especially now that we are mostly done with the distractions caused by the HAL integration and Trusted Solaris seems to be winding down a bit (or at least entering more of a maintenance mode - initial development is done). I'd expect we'd want HAL/GNOME integration to soak for a while before thinking it is smart to support. Should make sure that it works with a reasonable set of removable media and doesn't crash on particular configurations first. Testing seems to be going well, but a few serious problems have been reported and are being fixed. I expect this to go smoothly since the GNOME/HAL teams have been working closely together for several months and most problems were noticed and fixed before HAL integration. Also, a ton of new system tools went into our GNOME 2.16 builds, and I expect that they might evolve a bit as we get user feedback about how well they work, or how they need to be enhanced. Since these are Linux tools, they don't support some more advanced Solaris features and it wouldn't surprise me if people start requesting that they start to support some of them. Might be nice, for example, to manage /etc/user_attr via a GUI. If enough customers express need, then perhaps a good time to consider releasing something more offiical/supported/etc. would be after the virtual terminals integration. That seems a time when things in the desktop realm are really coming together. Perhaps then we'd also have time to get the updated Xorg Xserver into our builds. Then we could consider supporting compositing in the desktop. Lots of eye candy, but needs some work, and is completely inappropriate for some users (thin-client, SunRay). Would also be nice if we could get all the Sparc Xserver drivers ported to Xorg so we could do away with Xsun support on Sparc, though this is wishing too much I'm sure. I think Sun is having a hard time resourcing this project and it seems to keep be given a low priority. Still, long-term, dropping support for Xsun would save us a lot of time and help our team focus more on the latest technologies. Might also be nice to EOL CDE and Xsun at the same time since they have some odd interdependencies. So since virtual terminals is going in soon, perhaps we could find more people interested in helping the Xsun->Xorg Sparc migration. I'd talk to Alan.Coopersmith at sun.com if you think you can help here. If people want to help speed this process, then I'd recommend helping us by QA testing the Vermillion-devel builds. Especially accessibility QA testing (e.g. verify functionality works with Orca) would be helpful. Making sure our builds meet Section 508 Accessibility requirements is always a process that causes our releases to get slowed down. So if we had better feedback from the OpenSolaris community that things "just work", that would make the process faster. Perhaps if more people report bugs they find, then more people on this list could get involved with fixing them if they have an interest in being more involved with the OpenSolaris community. Brian > Iwan Rahabok wrote: >> It seems to me, the chance of JDS with GNOME 2.16 to make it for Update 4 is >> slim. If that's the case, any plan to make GNOME 2.16 as optional in Solaris >> 10 Update 4? By optional I mean it's the companion CD or something like that. >> >> >> The reason for asking is JDS 3 is getting outdated... > > Nothing currently. > > It's not impossible though [1], though the latest JDS builds make use of the > recently integrated Tamarack project which includes HAL. Without a backport of > HAL to Solaris 10 Update, there would be quite a bit of functionality > difference > between the 2 sets of packages. > > > Glynn > > [1] And perhaps this might be a good project for someone to pick up and > provide > contributed builds based on the JDS sources > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
