Last night I tried the KDE 3.1 that came on the Solaris Companion CD. It seems MUCH better than JDS/GNOME already. (Heck, the only hard part was figuring out exactly which C++ compiler they used (/opt/sfw/gcc-2/bin/gcc) so I could build some add-on theme engines) For as long as I can remember Sun pushing GNOME on Solaris, KDE has always felt MUCH faster on the platform. In fact, KDE may wind up doing the job just fine (after I test it a bit more).
I know everyone here says "blastwave this" and "blastwave that", but I frankly want to avoid Blastwave at all costs. The big problem I find on these "commercial 'nix platforms with free software support projects" is one of consistency and duplication. Every time I want to use someone's binary package, I also need that same someone's boatload of dependency packages (which I already had installed from someone else last month). Since GCC 3.x has forced free software code to be cleaner and more compatable, and since Sun Studio 10+ have become more compatable with free software code, this is how I now handle software: If it came with Solaris itself (/usr and /usr/sfw are much bigger on Sol 10) or the companion CD (/opt/sfw), I'll consider using it. Otherwise, I compile it myself. (first with the Sun compiler if possible, otherwise GCC) Thanks to a magical utility called GNU stow, I can even keep things very organized on the filesystem (not just in a package manager) Here's how: # ./configure --prefix=/usr/local # gmake # gmake install prefix=/software/foo-1.2 # cd /software # stow -t /usr/local foo-1.2 And it magically makes all the symlinks in /usr/local. The other beauty of self-compiling is that I don't have compiler-mismatch problems when linking dependencies. My biggest complaint against KDE these days is that it requires far too many source patches to build on Solaris, and those patches have not been rolled into the baseline. Once upon a time, I actually was able to compile my own KDE from source successfully. -Derek On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 07:36:20 -0500, Darin Perusich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Derek Konigsberg wrote: >> >> What's really annoying is that the interactive user experience is now >> *slower*, despite the base hardware being nearly twice as fast. I >> directly blame JDS for this (always used to prefer KDE to GNOME on >> Solaris for performance anyways, but KDE is getting harder and harder >> to cleanly integrate newer versions of into Solaris). > > we're running KDE 3.3.1 from blastwave.org and integration with solaris > isn't any easier then 'pkg-get -i kde_gcc'. granted this will install > ALL of KDE but it's easy to slim it down to just what you need. is your > "slower user experience" related to KDE or is this just in general? if > you kick on all of KDE GUI enhancements then it'll slow down a bit but > that can be controlled with KIOSK, check out > http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kiosktool/. > > -- > Darin Perusich > Unix Systems Administrator > Cognigen Corp. > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > _______________________________________________ > SunRay-Users mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
