Re: [osol-discuss] Re: CDE Vs JDS
On 2/13/06, Bill Rushmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Derek E. Lewis wrote: We may also define functional as how many apps each desktop environment has. CDE or JDS both have file managers -- dtfile and Nautilus, respectively; however, as everyone has said, CDE, itself, (meaning the apps it has, etc.) is much faster than JDS, so what gives? It is kind of hard to compare dtfile and Nautilus. That is one of the main differences between the two. In Nautilus you have things like support for Samba, burning CD's, and an iterface similar to a popular comercial OS. However, that might not matter too much to most CLI people (i.e. the typical Solaris user?). But the tabbed terminal was enough for me to switch. Maybe this is just me, but has anyone else noticed that all terminal emul. programs out there seem broken in some respect? gnome-terminal is pretty bad(though I do like the tabs as well), and I've had the best luck with dtterm, but I still occasionally have a problem with it. I'm never quite sure if its the term or the system I'm on. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Nvidia NForce 4 410 and 430 Chipset Drivers (spec. LAN and AUDIO)
On 1/13/06, Benjamin J Maki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has anybody had any luck getting the LAN and AUDIO working on any of the boards with the Nvidia NFORCE 4 MCP 410 or MCP 430 Chipsets? I've been testing on Foxconn 6100K8MA-RS and 6150K8MA-8EKRS boards and I'm having no luck. From what I can tell, the 6100 uses a Realtek PHY and NVidia MAC and the 6150 uses Marvell PHY and NVIDIA MAC. The ID that comes up for the NIC is pci10de,0269 on both. Do you know if these have the actual nforce ethernet or just the MCP chip used on nforce boards? I seem to recall someone else asking about a similar board with one of those ethernet controllers. On the Ultra 20 (which I think is nforce4) the nge driver comes up as pci10de,057, and actual device comes up as a CK804 Ethernet Controller. If that isn't what comes up for you, then you may need to get a 3rd party driver from Murayama's page or it may not work at all. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Build 29 or newer?
On 1/11/06, Rich Teer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Given that the timing would be the same, I htink just posting build 30 is the right way to go. And I for one am eagerly awaiting that build, becuase it fixes an issue with the NVIDIA frame buffer driver! There's always the source or the bfu archive. Just don't brickify your install right after you do it like I did. Whoops. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Companion CD [ was: KDE, GNOME, etc. ]
On 1/3/06, Stefan Teleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 1/3/06, David Schanen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I would imagine that Sun Studio may generate better code for some intense computational tasks, and I never claimed it doesn't. I would also imagine that KDE's components do not do any computationally intensive tasks. i imagine, i would imagine, i bet and i feel is not computer science. Well, what I wrote was tongue in cheek, but no imagining in CS? Surely you must be thinking of IBM. ;-) How would we write programs if we didn't conceptualize them first? There a number of obvious reasons, that are grounded in how we design architectures for why things like interfaces for desktop applications are incapable of being optimized by same techniques that might be applied to a mathematical algorithm like your example. The former is event based, while the latter can often benefit substantially from pipeling, et cetera. Pick any KDE application you want, most of its grunt work is done by libraries external to itself (e.g. ffmpeg, X.org, libmpg123). Maybe if you compiled some of those with Sun Studio there would be a benefit. having spent daily time since November of 2002 working on KDE Solaris (back when KDE had given up on KDE with GCC because performance on SPARC was lousy, and KDE no longer had Solaris builds), i have come to certain conclusions in regards to GCC vs. Sun Studio performance (or Forte as it was known back then). insofar as i am concerned, KDE Solaris with GCC is not going to happen. every Tom, Dick and Harry can type './configure' followed by 'gmake' and build KDE on their own. my participation in this collective exercise is neither required, nor necessary. Yeah, but you have any proof that the Sun Studio built KDE is faster? How do you know its even worth the effort? Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] KDE, GNOME, etc.
On 12/18/05, Gary Gendel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I believe that we shouldn't get ourselves lost into the pissing contest. However, I do feel that OpenSolaris should have both JDS and KDE as an user option. Personally, I find both bloatware, but I'd rather not be caught on the wrong side of this battle and have fodder for the bad mouthers. So what do people think about bypassing X and toolkits altogether and using the JNI to write the interfaces for apps in dirty Java? I've noticed some of the Sun developed Solaris apps appear to have moved that way in recent years. Too wasteful? Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Is anyone else using the Nvidia binary driver?
I'm not sure about the appropriate forum for this, feel free to e-mail me off list to lower traffic. Basically I'm trying to isolate the source of my problem using the Nvidia drivers with build 28. I had 1.0-7667 working on an older Solaris Express with a couple bfu's applied, but then I had some downtime and re-installed from scratch with the new ISO's the other day. I'm not sure if this is an incompatibility with the newer kernel or the newer x.org sources, and would like to track down the problem. When X starts, I get the dreaded unable to initialize kernel module error (I've tried the last 3 revisions of the driver at this point, all with the same issue). I've also noted that /dev/nvidiactl is ok but that the link /dev/fbs/nvidia0 is missing after install and reboot, as is /devices/pci.../nvidia-0. I'm not sure if that entry is critical or not. Because of that, I'm thinking this is an incompatility unrelated to the new x.org, but I'm just speculating really. If anyone has any thoughts on how to track down the problem or has a working configuration, I would love to hear about it. I'm assuming Nvidia will be no help on this, since Solaris 10 is the only supported configuration. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Is anyone else using the Nvidia binary driver?
On 12/16/05, Rich Teer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, David Schanen wrote: Basically I'm trying to isolate the source of my problem using the Nvidia drivers with build 28. I had 1.0-7667 working on an older You really should read the README: there's a known problem with the Nvidia driver and build 28/29 (it's apparently fixed in build 30). I usually use the NVidia driver (-81xx is out now, BTW), but with build 28 I'm using the X.org nv driver. It works for my limited 2d work, but is a bit slower than the NVidia driver (but not unacceptably so). Yes, I tried 8175, 7676, and 7667. I also searched the opensolaris bugzilla for nvidia but sadly got no hits that described these problems. I didn't see any mention of it in release notes from the community edition ISO's but maybe I missed it, and it didn't occur to me to check the README for the opensolaris tar files. If I could get reasonable 2d acceleration with the NV driver, then I could live with it, but even browsing Sun's front page in Firefox is painful. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/26/05, Joerg Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Conclusion: If Sun did do what has been planned and integrated star instead of GNU tar in Solaris-10, nobody would miss GNU tar. Hi Jörg, So I assume star has been tested pretty rigorously at this point, but are you sure it will extract all archives made with GNU tar? If so, I'm certainly sold. Also, have you ever looked into having GNU incorporate your fixes? Cheers, David ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/25/05, UNIX admin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Don't call things optional that are needed to make UNIX homey to people Sorry, but I must say, what is too much is too much! There is no reason gtar should be included when there is tar or star just for the reason of catering to Linux crowd. Solaris is Solaris, if they came over to Solaris then they better learn Solaris. Otherwise, they can stay with Linux and be homey. If someone can't live without their GNU tools, soon enough they'll have the pkgadd tools and they can add whatever they need from Blastwave. Maybe we should rename OpenSolaris to OpenSolinux so that the Linux crowd would feel more at home? I get tarballs all the time that require the non-standard GNU behavior to extract, and I would be annoyed if I had to install blastwave for something so trivial. And if the distribution is called GNU/Solaris, I would expect some basic GNU tools, yes; Linux has nothing to do with that. And wouldn't it be OpenSoHurd? :) Since approx. 1995 when bash became usable, things did change and it seems that there are people who like to see bash everywhere. Note that csh is just a nightmare compared to bash. I've been using tcsh since at least 1995 and possibly earlier, and even then it had loads and loads of features that still trod bash into the ground today. I don't know why you didn't know about it, but I can say it's not my fault... I didn't know you existed back then! :) Lots of people prefer the various incarnations of Csh, and kudos to them, but the official posix shell is a variation on the Bourne shell, and bash can (in theory at least) emulate this posixly correct behavior. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Solaris support of USB Ethernet Adapters for external USB ports
On 11/18/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I thought nforce 4 was supported? nge nge (7d)- Nvidia ck8-04 Gigabit Ethernet driver There was an issue where an earlier Solaris Express installer wouldn't load the driver for initial installs, but I thought that was fixed(?). I had that issue on an Ultra 20, so I just did the install without networking support and then loaded the driver and configured the networking post-install. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Solaris support of USB Ethernet Adapters for
On 11/18/05, mx [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the nforce4 chip set use a Marvel NIC which is not supported. I filed a bug on this and was informed that it does not work. No, the ethernet provided by the nForce4 chipset is made by nVidia and works with the driver Casper posted. Your motherboard maker may have put a Marvel adapter on it as well. If your board has two RJ-45 plugs on the back, then you're in luck, because one of those should be the nVidia adapter and will work after you load the driver for it, if it's not loaded already. If not, you either have a really bizzare nForce motherboard that I've never seen before, or its not a Marvel setup like you think. Btw, in the future you might want to put the model of the particular board you're using in your post, it might people in helping you figure out your problem. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/17/05, Scott N. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I really think that opensolaris should remain a core that Sun uses to gather enhancements from some great minds in the open source community for its Solaris flagship rather than have opensolaris available to bastardize it with countless 'distro's to fit what others have in mind of what OpenSolaris should be. And then taking their ball with them if the opensolaris community doesn't like it. This is what happened to, and continues to happen, with Linux and this is the reason I eventually came to like the bsd's so much better. The feeling of coherentsy in the BSD's fit more my philosophy and felt so much more better than the ridiculous mess of Linux. Sun opening up and making Solaris Free (source) was not for it to be 'forked' into distro hell but rather to gather help, Q/A and some momentum. With that, we all get the most advanced OS for free (price) now. Some of this is going to happen regardless, mostly because of the clash of egos. Whether GNU/Linux or the BSD OS's are more fragmented is questionable--there is just one Linux kernel source, but is Free, Open, and NetBSD all have their own sources. If you think about it, most of the compability problems in the GNU world are not due to fragmentation anyway, but rathter stuff like the kernel (2.4 vs 2.6) and glibc, and large projects like GNOME with many dependencies that will change their abi over time. After my initial trial with Nexenta and then finding that X was installed in non-stardard Solaris location, I have now made an effort to only support TRUE Solaris-like 'distro's' like Schillix or even better may just stick with Solaris Express for my needs (Why hasn't there been a 'distro' where I can install SE without the long 4-cd install process). If I am going to use and support Solaris, I want to be learning and using SOLARIS. Not some distro that goes off in its own direction (namely the dumb Linux direction) and then just adds the SunOS kernel. This is unnessary, Just continue to use Linux/Debian/Ubuntu/GNU then if it is SO good! All this wasted effort could be put to better use like making Blastwave better or something. So long as Sun remains in business you will continue to have be able to use their version of Solaris, and I suspect they will continue to implent standards like the single unix specification, etc. Solaris Express is also their thing, and changing it will have to be something they do. Not everything in there is re-distributable, so we cannot just repackage in some other way. I wouldn't make too many judgments about Nexenta at this point, since that was a pre-alpha, which may or may not reflect the first release. Whether there is one OpenSolaris distribution or 5, people are still going to end up pooling efforts on most of the coding. The differences between various Linux distributions and between the BSD's are mostly superficial, and they end up sharing lots of code anyway. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Is 'forking' inevitable here too?
On 11/15/05, Joerg Schilling [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Erast Benson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Very good point and a right concern (to some degree) IMHO... As J.S. mentioned before, in the future we should expect at least 2 types of OpenSolaris-based distros: a) GNU-centric, those who trying to re-use GNU/Linux as much as possible b) Solaris-centric, those who trying to mimic Solaris as much as possible But I'm hoping that both (a) and (b) will be *much more* compatable than any two distros in GNU/Linux world. And the reason for my hope is that we are using the same Least Common Denominator(LCD) - OpenSolaris(tm) which is not just a kernel but userland too and developed under the single roof. In my sense, LCD will preserve inter-distro compatability. If you move all binaries from /usr/bin/ to /usr/sun/, like Nexenta is doing, there is not much user space compatibility with Solaris left over. I haven't used the pre-alpha, but I think this actually wouldn't be such a big deal. Assuming things are done intelligently, there is the 'alternatives' mechanism on Debian and by default you could have symlinks to make rather than gmake and tar rather than gtar, et al. by default. You could even create a package indicating Solaris compatability that requires all the basic stuff kind of like Linux standard base is done. Using absolute paths (like some Makefile's obnoxious tendency to assume /bin/bash does something, grrr!), is not something I would want to encourage. Of course, maybe there are a lot of applications for Solaris out there that make assumptions about paths, I don't know. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] How to lower CPU utilization of applications?
On 11/14/05, phreedom [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The question is how to lower the CPU utilization of an application. - Is there any general rules? - What kind of operations consume large amount of CPU time? - How to make sure multiple instance of applications not working in too-awful way? For example, when using gzip compress a big file, the CPU utilization could be more than 40%. But if using 3 gzip session simultaneously, the system will still have 10+ % of idle time. But for my application, single instance will consume 40% CPU, and 3 instances will always make CPU idle time to zero. My own experience is that as far gzip on sata/ata, most of that is due to the latency of the disk. While prstart and top are nice tools, they're not really the best for testing actual number crunching as distinct from iowait. As far as the first question, Dtrace actually has a lot of nice functionality to see where time is spent. You can get all kinds of interesting performance information with probes There's good documentation on docs.sun.com and bigadmin. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Sparc ? x86 Comparison
On 10/11/05, S Destika [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't discussing how good Redhat or Suse's support is - Even Sun support has sucked upon me - it all depends on who is handling your case. I can't say Sun ever made stuff up when they couldn't help me. They also publish Bug IDs that are fixed in particular patches, so I have some idea what is in new revisions. And you were discussing how good their support was, you made direct claims about how Enterprises use them. It sounded suspiciously like a direct endorsement. Can you detail which apps broke upon you recently and since you claim to be knowing more than RH support does, do you know why they were broken? I mean come on - I use binaries from 2001 today and they work just fine. Unless you use *broken* apps which are coded to depend on non-standard, unpublished features, I bet your programs are going to work. Hell, even changes as big as NPTL didn't cause trouble with *sanely coded* applications. And the segfaults - you must be running a broken kernel or broken app. Former surely will get fixed if you have support contract with RH / SUSE that's even better, but even if you don't just drop a mail to linux-kernel. Surely get fixed? Have you tried it? The applications are too numerous to list, anything program of scale has a potential to fail. Where would I even begin... NetCDF is pretty touchy for one, and extremely widely used. I'm not impressed if you have 2001 era programs that still run--I have Linux bins from 1996 that still run, its because they're small and statically compiled, surprise surprise. What you said is _clearly_ a case of spreading FUD, uninvited, particularly when we are discussing scalability and performance here. You are of course welcome to use what you like and what suits you but when you say something back it up with facts, logic and numbers instead of questioning somebody else's experiences. No, I addressed your particular claims about enterprises using Linux systems. I could reference your particular messages in which you made your claims, but it would probably be a waste of time. I question why are you advocating something you seem to have no direct experience with, and I want to know what actual applications you think the SPEC benchmarks reflect. In my own comparions with the applications we use, I've found Solaris and Redhat have very little to do with the actual performance, most of it seems to be compiler dependent, and so the major issue for me is whether or not I get reasonable uptime, stability, etc. so we can run our stuff in the first place. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Sparc ? x86 Comparison
David Schanen's Complete quote was: In my own comparions with the applications we use, I've found Solaris and Redhat have very little to do with the actual performance, most of it seems to be compiler dependent, and so the major issue for me is whether or not I get reasonable uptime, stability, etc. so we can run our stuff in the first place. To which S. Dekistra replied: You don't seem to have dealt with Java any time, have you? Compiler dependent, huh? That would be true for scientific applications running mostly in user space but if you ever dealt with real software deployed by businesses you would know that SPEC benchmarks such as jAppServer, JBB etc. matter and operating system scalability to deal with gigabytes of memory, tons of processors, and a load of network connections matters a lot. What makes you think SPEC is useless? Have you ever seen what they do with SPEC benchmarks? Actually, I did most of CS classes in Java, because its quite fashionable among instructors these days. Then I discovered to my abject horror that Fortran 95 is often the linqua franca of the scientific computing world (particularly in academia) and it and the C language happen to be that languages for the applications I referred to in my previous post. This probably a good thing, since something written in Java would take a long time to do the sort of computationally intensive tasks scientists with expensive computers demand. I don't recall writing spec.org benchmarks are useless, but I might describe them as synthetic, and also rather expensive to purchase. WRF is free, while Spec Env is expensive, so the clear choice here is free. You can do your own benchmarks by running your own applications with varied sets of parameters, and shockingly they are often more representative of the performance you're going to see with that application. While this can be interesting and fun to compare with colleagues running different systems, frankly 4 hours of sim time vs. 4 hrs 15 min is not the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. What does keep me up at night is all the coffee and drink, and the fear that I'll come into work tomorrow and a small bug will have crept into the system and neither myself nor the Redhat technical goons will be able to diagnose and fix it. And I don't think we need to discuss Redhat and Sun support here. I reiterate that we are discussing scalability and performance in this thread - and also that I am not spreading FUD that Solaris and Sun support sucks because I know both are technically speaking good things and one should use what he/she likes and suits there need - no need to go into FUD mode or exclusivity. I don't think what I said qualifies as FUD. It's not like I said, buy UltraSPARCs in large quantities because all the Linux machines are going to implode in 2015! It was more along the lines of, your claims are not in line with my experiences with software in question. If you don't want to discuss reliability with scalability, don't digress the discussion into it. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Sparc ? x86 Comparison
On 10/10/05, S Destika [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You don't need to patch the Kernel on your own if you use vendor supported ones. You are comparing freeware Linux distro with paid Solaris support. Enterprises go with RHEL, SLES and with support - Redhat/SuSE fix whatever is busted. There are many shops running Linux in their Enterprise. One of them even posted here. I administer a cluster of RHEL3 machines actually, and you seem to have several misconceptions about it. We don't use 4, even though it has been out for some time, because nearly all the applications we use aren't supported under it. They update the kernel frequently, though their changelog's are too ambiguous to discern exactly what they changed. Enterprise 3 has been out for some time, yet new kernel revisions end up in the stable channel at least once a month, so I'll grant you its not daily (but then I don't keep up with how often 4 releases new kernels, maybe it is nearly that often). I must say, they break our applications much less frequently than in the early days of 3, when rebooting from 2.4.21-9.0.2 to -9.0.3 really ran a chance of causing segfaults in important programs. Their actual tech support is subpar as far as I'm concerned, and on the few occasions I've contacted them I concluded they knew even less than I did about our problems and will just make stuff up when they can't help you (yes, really). So I would have to assume based on your admiration for the product you have no actual experience with it, outside of running it on your personal machine, or at all. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Re: Re: Re: Swtching from Windows to Solaris
On Friday 07 October 2005 07:48 pm, W. Wayne Liauh wrote: The fact that Solaris is different from Linux, and that it requires a steeper learning curve, may actually be advertised as an advantage. (Read: an elite OS) Easy may not play well with business users. OTOH a default Linux installation (especially on notebooks) is inherently insecure. It's just that no one bothers to talk about it. (Of course this problem can be easily fixed, but the key word is the default installation.) This message posted from opensolaris.org Alan DuBoff wrote: I'm not so sure that I would say Solaris requires a steeper learning curve than Linux, both require quite a learning curve. I don't find Solaris any more difficult, and in some ways it's easier for me. And yes, I have worked on both Linux and Embedded Linux in the past, so I'm very familiar with them, as well as *BSD. However, I wouldn't place either of them as an end all solution for all cases, and I'm a believer in using the right tool for the job. There are some things I wouldn't use Solaris for, such as an embedded device with minimal memory and storage. Similarly, I wouldn't use Linux in a 4-way server where heavy loads are a requirement. I second everything you wrote, and would add that the percieved difficulty of using any given operating system / environment is always a function of what you're attempting to do with it. No one is truly qualified to speak on how easy or difficult Solaris or GNU/Linux is outside their specific domain of experience. For example, most Linux distributions do seem have intuitive installers, but now that I find myself working with it every day, I often find myself wishing it handled certain tasks in manner more like Solaris. It seems like things change rapidly and a little thing can set off a chain reaction in a large system that can ruin my whole day. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Swtching from Windows to Solaris
On 10/5/05, Andrew K [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been aware of Solaris' existence for a while, (geeky comic books and such) and have been more interested. Now I've decided that I might try switching to Solaris. The only problem I have is I need to keep contact with people via MSN Messenger and AIM. Is there a list of OSS for Solaris which might contain the messengers? Gaim supports both of these protocols http://gaim.sourceforge.net/. It is included with the Java Desktop System that comes with Solaris 10 and Solaris Express, but blastwave has a newer copy, which is probably what you want. It works on GNU/Linux, *bsd, etc. too obviously. Other than that I'm just concerned with my collection of music and ability to transfer school work and such. If you're thinking about an iPod, you would have to do some hacking. Assuming your sound hardware is supported, playing mp3s and ogg files should pose no problem. What's the difference between OpenSolaris and Solaris 10 provided by SUN? An exact answer to this question would be better answered on the opensolaris website, but if you're just looking for something to try out, you probably want Solaris 10. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] StarOffice 8
On 10/2/05, Robert Milkowski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Friday, September 30, 2005, 7:08:34 PM, you wrote: WWL A few years ago, I heard that Sun is going to force everyone under Sun's roof to convert to StarOffice. I am wondering how that endeavor is coming along. But I do know that Novell has WWL successfully converted essentially all of its 8,000 Microsoft Office licenses to OpenOffice. Not good... I've received from Sun a support agreement draft in MS Word... then I converted it to SO and sent back with some corrections and was asked to go back to MS Office... not a big deal but still a little bit surprising. Well, I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from your interactions with one employee given the size of Sun. Do you know if they were a full-time employee, some form of contractor, etc.? I would imagine if you talked to the right person at Microsoft you'd run a chance of interacting with someone who swears by LaTeX and doesn't use Word at all, but it's doubtful that person would be representative of the company as as whole. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] No CDE in OpenSolaris
On 9/11/05, Derek E. Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2. GNOME works as well FOR ME as CDE does today. Spoken like a true CDE user. CDE just offers *so* much functionality. It's lightweight and for us Motif-lovers, it's easy on the eyes. You might look at Xfce if you haven't already. I can't quite get the front/open/Fxx keys work as they do in CDE, but it comes pretty close and is written in gtk. Does anyone from Sun care to comment on the course that CDE will take over the next few years? I'd really, really hate to see CDE fade away into oblivion. There's still a lot of people (especially, in the professional computing world -- scientists, etc.) that rely on CDE, like myself. If Sun does EOL CDE, I would love to see it untangled from patent troubles and released to the public -- doesn't have to be open sourced, so one would be free to re-incorporate back into the OS if one so desires. I can't speak for Sun, but I believe Motif and CDE are still a requirement for UNIX certification, so I think ending support entirely would be out of the question, though they could certainly limit their development to bug fixes. Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Re: [osol-discuss] Re: Openwindows status
On 8/14/05, Richard L. Hamilton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: cmdtool is in the xview source; some of the rest of the clients would be nice, although the mailtool is very lame as is; if it were released, I'd think people would want to quickly make it at least as MIME-capable (sending as well as receiving) as dtmail. I think textedit may be out there somewhere too, or if not, it should be fairly trivial. I have a copy of the source for a cmdtool variant called btool, with a bunch of programmable buttons down the right side. There's no explicit copyright info in it; here's the comment at the top of the file containing main(): That would be great, assuming it isn't copyrighted. OLIT would be a problem; that actually belonged to ATT, later USL, later Novell. Somewhere along the line they redid it as MoOLIT, which could I think have a user-selectable Motif or Open Look look and feel, but maintained the OLIT API. The rights for that somehow passed to www.mjm.com. They don't mention on their site that they still license it, but I think they do; although whether that would only be binaries, or source too, I have no idea. I suspect it wouldn't be easy to talk them into giving it away, although it might be fun to watch someone try. Yeah, that certainly puts a damper on doing that. Do they own the actual OLIT code or do they own the MoOLIT code? It was my understanding that somewhere along the line Sun paid off the owner of the SVR4 sources used in Solaris. Personally, if I wanted to spend a lot of energy harassing some bunch of folks to loosen their grip on a desktop environment, I wouldn't bother with Open Look, much as I once liked it, but rather would go after The Open Group folks, and CDE. Along those lines, I wonder if OpenSolaris is open enough to be eligible to use OpenMotif on it? According to their website, the OS and kernel need only be under a OSI approved license, so that is do able: http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/faq.html Though personally, I kind of despise CDE and Motif. Gnome2 less cumbersome to configure, but it's so bloated. Metacity and gnome-terminal are *huge* considering what they do. I can't imagine running it on a machine with less than 256 MB of ram. It isn't a big deal for me since I have a nice machine, but I would think one role for OpenSolaris would be for non-profits and such that are using old equipment, and who would ultimately end up having to install and configure fwvm or similar. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
[osol-discuss] Openwindows status
Hello all, For whatever reason, I was curious what the status of the Openwindows source was. You can obtain Xview from X.org, but apparently there are still some components which are still closed. I was thinking specifically of components mentioned in: ftp://step.polymtl.ca/pub/Xview/OWacomp/README_OW3_Sol_9_10.txt For some reason I like the openwindows interface, don't ask me why. Cheers, Dave ___ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
