[...] > > Perhaps someone internally can comment how > "closely" mwm resembles dtwm > > without violating any NDAs? I'd be interested in > what features mwm lacks > > that dtwm has.
I have no internal access, but I think you could determine pretty much all you wanted to know about that by comparing the man pages. For example, .mwmrc is a subset of .dt/dtwmrc, for all practical purposes. Mwm has no toolbar, no concept of CDE types and actions, and no integration with dtstyle (which can tell dtwm to restart if it needs to). Mwm is really just a lightweight Motif-based and Motif-friendly (in terms of window menu support and suchlike) window manager. I think someone needs to determine if OpenSolaris is compatible with "Open"Motif's constraint that it's only free for open-source OSs, and whether Sun has permission to use it for their partially closed Solaris distro (I suppose they might, since they have a license for CDE, and before CDE made Motif (and mwm?) available for awhile; but I don't know for a fact.) I don't see any particular reason why you couldn't download the source and play with it a bit for yourself. I'm reasonably sure I have a copy of mwm somewhere, and had once played with it a bit and tweaked some resources to make it have the blue-gray of the CDE default color scheme rather than it's internal blue default, along with a few font tweaks and such. Once that and a reasonable .mwmrc are created, I recall it as being tolerable, given that one accepts the reduced functionality. As for me, I'll probably just snag a copy of the last CDE binaries and carefully put them on top of systems that no longer have CDE, like some people (me included) have been doing for awhile with the OpenLook deskset. Not supported, but it mostly works (I even have some notes somewhere...). Or better, I'll cross my fingers that TOG decides they can release CDE code. Even if they can't release Motif itself, for me personally that's an ideological but not practical issue, since Sun will probably have to supply the bare Motif libs (and even headers, I guess) forever since most commercial apps still use Motif; I don't guess I'd have too much trouble getting the CDE code to work with that (or with OpenMotif, on OpenSolaris). I would suppose that if CDE were released, someone (blastwave maybe?) would pick it up even when Sun would no longer support it. In the long run, I'd like to think that open source would do one of the things it was originally intended to: solve the problem of orphan software, and together with the combination of vendor and non-vendor package based repositories (that were well-behaved together with vendor packages!), provide for continuing easy access to orphans and even the opportunity for providing or obtaining independent support for them. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
