When I first heard that Oracle was planning to purchase Sun, my initial
reaction was excitement. If anybody has the character to go
head-to-head with the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the Desktop
market, I cannot imagine anyone other than Mr. Ellison.
But, my delusional initial impression aside, I think that the Desktop
has a bright future in Solaris. A more practical desktop market for
Oracle is to encourage more Sun Ray users to consider free desktop
based solutions. Obviously, for this to be successful, the desktop
needs to run well on Sun Ray. Better Sun Ray support would also
benefit the Trusted Extensions product, since it is typically used on
Sun Ray platforms.
When the next Solaris LTS[2] release comes out this will be the first
Sun Ray supported release that supports Sun Ray with a modern desktop
since Solaris 10 was released in 2005. The new GNOME 2.30 desktop is
a significant leap forward compared with the GNOME 2.6 desktop found
in Solaris 10. For example, it will have far superior multimedia
support (thanks Garrett) including much better support for cameras and
removable media (thanks Artem) and the ability to play media in popular
formats (MPEG, WindowsMedia) if you purchase the Fluendo plugins.
In other words, for the first time in 7 years, Sun Ray will be
competitive with other terminal server free desktop products such as
those provided by LTSP and Wyse/Novell. If we can plan to provide
GNOME desktop updates more regularly than every 7 years going forward,
there is no reason we need to loose this edge.
That said, GNOME 3.0 is being released next March. At its core is
gnome-shell which has a hard dependency on OpenGL, not supported by Sun
Ray. gnome-shell provides for a great desktop experience, and it
already works well in testing on OpenSolaris where OpenGL is
available. Spec files for building are available in the
spec-files-extra repository.[1] You just need to build the
SFEgjs.spec, SFEmutter.spec, and SFEgnome-shell.spec files on a recent
OpenSolaris build. Would be great to get feedback, report bugs
upstream, and I would like to encourage OpenSolaris users to check it
out.
The GNOME community is currently recommending providing long-term
support for the old GNOME 2.x gnome-panel, gnome-applets, and metacity
for platforms like Sun Ray that do not support OpenGL. Since almost
every major distro is having a LTS[2] release this year shipping GNOME
2.x, there should be no real concern about ongoing support for many
years to come. Focusing on making the Sun Ray GNOME 2.30 Desktop work
well in the next LTS release of Solaris is a major focus for me right
now.
Looking forward, I have also been doing some review of lighter desktop
solutions such as XFCE[3] and LXDE[1]. I recently updated the XFCE
and LXDE spec-files so you can build and run the latest version. Both
seem considerably more light-weight than GNOME without any animations,
though my first impression is that XFCE is a bit better suited for the
Sun Ray environment. XFCE does have a few notable issues:
- The file manager desktop icons on the background are not
displaying nicely
- The panel does not support keyboard navigability needed for
accessibility.
- Since XFCE also uses the GNOME Platform libraries (aka libatk, cairo,
pango, GTK+, etc.), it does have some accessibility support. It has
no mechanism to autolaunch AT programs, so you need to launch them
from your $HOME/.profile or something. Users can run applications by
using the hotkey to launch the "Run" dialog and type in the name of
programs to run them, since the panel is not accessible.
- XFCE does not support Trusted Extensions.
I would like to make an appeal to the OpenSolaris community to help
us with the GNOME Shell, XFCE, and LXDE projects by building them and
trying them out. It would be especially valuable to get any feedback
from any Sun Ray users out there about how well they perform compared
to GNOME.
It would also be great if someone could provide the related packages
via some community IPS server. This would be a great way to provide
some of the latest desktop features that seem generally useful to
users and customers. It also helps to keep a nice focus on further
developing the Solaris free desktop
At a time when there seems to be such criticism, I hope that this email
reminds people that Oracle developers are still working hard to provide
great free software for OpenSolaris, and there are exciting
opportunities to do interesting work together.
Brian
[1] http://pkgbuild.sourceforge.net/spec-files-extra/
[2] Long Term Support
[3] http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+xfce/building_xfce
On 08/14/10 07:50 AM, joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de wrote:
Michael Widmann<michael.widm...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi
Form my personal opinion Oracle should make only one statement
that could resolve and blow away the fear from users / customers
contributors, illumnos project members and so on:
We - Oracle decide that our effort should be to build the strongest
and best Server OS with Solaris11. That's our business, that's our core!
On the other side, we of course support contributors to make a desktop
version from the source of the upcoming Solaris11 to broaden the user base
of solaris OS - show the key concepts and all this.
It's as simple:
Support Illumnos for working together.
Working together to the benefit of both sides was the plan from September 14
2004.
Sun was expected to do the work that was seen to be of commercial interest while
the community was expected to work on the parts that are of interest for the
Community.
Given the fact that the OpenSolaris Summit in the Santa Clara Town Hall in
September 2004 was a Sun internal meeting where only a few external OSS
developers have been invited, it is obviouy that in 2004 this really has been
the goal for Sun.
Unfortunately, this never has been turned into reality.
As there have been aprox. 450 Sun employees in the Santa Clara Town Hall, it is
obvious that there stil must be a sufficient number of people working for
Oracle that remember September 14th 2004.....
Jörg
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