Anon Y Mous wrote: > I hate running GNOME in OpenSolaris on old hardware anyway. It > uses up a lot of RAM and system resources if you don't have > something powerful like a monster Nvidia card with it's own > GPU and 1/4 to 1/2 of a gig of RAM to power it. I liked how > CDE was made available as an alternative light-weight desktop > in Solaris Express, however CDE can't be used in OpenSolaris > because it is proprietary closed source software owned by the > open group. > > XFCE 2 had a theme that looked almost exactly the way that CDE > looked in Solaris 8, 9, and 10. So what do you guys say. XFCE > with this CDE theme as a replacement for CDE in OpenSolaris? > > If GNOME ever gives Solaris the shaft, we can always rely on > our Solaris CDE-look-a-like XFCE theme as it is more in line > with what traditional old-school UNIX administrators want on > their Solaris box anyway.
This is interesting to hear. As GNOME 3.0 moves towards making more and more use of OpenGL, there is an increasing need to support a lighter desktop for Sun Ray environments, environments where people want to use the desktop over high latency networks, to support older hardware that doesn't work with OpenGL, etc. XFCE might be a good option. One issue to consider, though, is accessibility. It is really important to Sun to provide an accessible desktop. So, how do the more lightweight desktop environments stack up in terms of accessibility? XFCE uses GTK+ based widgets, so that probably gives some accessibility for free. That said, you typically don't get a fully accessible program without some additional work. I remember some of the biggest issues about getting the GNOME desktop working with accessibility was ensuring that users had reasonable key navigability, so they could navigate to the GNOME panel via Ctrl-Alt-Shift and then use the various applets via the arrow keys and the Return key, etc. Since many applets were designed to be very visual focused, making them accessible is sometimes a challenge. Also, the GNOME desktop allows you to configure it so that AT programs (like GOK or orca) are launched automatically for a given user. If there is an interest in the OpenSolaris community to help analyze which lightweight desktops offer the best accessibility, then that would be very helpful towards getting one integrated. It would be good, for example, to start reporting any bugs found upstream so we can start the process of working with the upstream communities on this. Maybe someone should make the XFCE packages available and ping the accessibility-discuss at opensolaris.org mailing list to see if we could get help doing an accessibility evaluation? Brian
