KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.
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Member since:2005-06-29
I wouldn't say its portability, but rather buildability. KDE is absolutely trivial to build from SVN because there's only about 5 things you have to check out and build in order. Gnome on the other hand took the route of reuse as much stuff as possible and so you need scripts that automagically download and build everything in the right order.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-07
you're right about: the launch button, the taskbar
you're wrong about:
- the clock, it's right next to the launch button
- the filepicker: scrolls vertically, has a shelf area
- the color dialog
- the "minimize all applications" (which I assume you mean), it doesn't autoreopen windows after an action
- the order of items (you mean on the launch menu?), it is different
- the browser, it is plain mozilla, which is launched if you attempt to open a https?:// url in nautilus
- icons and cursors, they're not jumping around
- the name "openwindows", it is buried in solaris 10
let me guess: you've never seen JDS3, right?
Member since:2005-06-29
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-07
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> What exactly does that mean for the
> developer and for the end user?
It means that g++-compiled c++ binaries cannot load sun-compiled c++ libraries and than sun-compiled c++ binaries cannot load g++-compiled c++ libraries. g++ and the sun compiler are as incompatible to each other as g++-2.95/g++-3.2 and g++-3.2/g++-4.0. g++ does not have a stable c++ ABI, it changes every 24 months.
Member since:2005-07-07
"pretty darn good" is an overstatement - it does a good job, and it excels at portability, but the latter comes at a price, which is that it tends to be worse than specialized compilers (sunpro exists for sparc and ia32/amd64, nothing else - and I wouldn't assume that the sparc and ia32 backends have much in common)
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2005-07-12
Once OpenSolaris with KDE (and a nice collection of KDE and Java apps, with Java SDK and J2EE container and NetBeans) is available on a live CD, or can be easily downloaded and installed on my Thinkpad, eMachines PC, or Gateway PC, I'm there.
Solaris / OpenSolaris is intriguiging me more and more. I'm pretty big on Linux (I use Mepis, Fedora, CentOS, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and Kanotix), and I prefer the GPL to the CDDL. But as far as I'm concerned, another good, accessible *nix system thrown into the mix can only be a good thing.
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The gnome developers should be taken note of this. Once more kde gets first to a new platform. As I have said in NetBSD related topics, kde´s portability is showing its good design with every new port.
No one is working on a Gnome port to OpenSolaris because Sun has their own Gnome port for Solaris - JDS - and the goal is to open up the development process for JDS in the near future as part of OpenSolaris.
See:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Ailing_Sun_desktop_to_get...
Note that JDS is and always has been open source, as it's based on Gnome, but currently the integration work is done by internal Sun engineers alone.
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2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
Since there is not a "OpenSolaris distribution", or at least the closest thing there is to one that can run X11 at all is Solaris Express: Community Release, then JDS3 comes with it, so is just as applicable. The only difference is that KDE may be the "first" from the OpenSolaris community. But "vanilla GNOME" was already available to run via blastwave.org long before KDE 3.4.1, so this article has a mis-leading headline...
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Since there is not a "OpenSolaris distribution", or at least the closest thing there is to one that can run X11 at all is Solaris Express: Community Release, then JDS3 comes with it, so is just as applicable.
I don't want to add to the noise here, but this comment demonstrates a weakness in OSNews' new moderation scheme UI.
The writer above seems to think that this comment:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11285&threshold=-5&limit=...
is in response to this comment:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11285&threshold=-5&limit=...
But it's not. It's part of a seperate thread. I've seen similar confusion elsewhere.
It happened here because the parent posts in the JDS3 thread have all been modded down. Sure, the subject lines differ, but these two comments follow one another (if you're reading at default -1 moderation) and both mention JDS. Modded down posts disappear from view, leaving unrelated posts to smush together - sometimes creating a false dialogue. It's very easy for the casual reader to make mistakes like this.
I think something could be learned from the tree-based Slashdot comment UI here, but I'm not sure. I'm sure there's a way to make the flow of post-moderated comments seem more obvious, without overcomplicating things. Hope this is something the OSNews folks are devoting some thought to.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Actually, moderated down posts, should just be folded in.
like:
http://www.newz.dk/forum/item/57182/ - Sorry, for danish language 
They have a small [-] on the top, which allows a part to be folded smaller or larger. And depending on your threshhold and others moderation, it will be folded in automatically when you read the thread. And also, you can (when logged in), also specify the nature of the post (Fun, Relevant, Irrelevant, Flamebait and so forth).
And you can also see who modded it up or down. All of it done using javascript posting, so you never leaver the page so to speak.
Works very well.
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Did you read any of the thread before asking that? If you had you might have noticed where binarycrusader said
"The SUN compiler produces better code sometimes, but the main reason is because of C++ ABI differences between the SUN compiler and the GCC compiler."
Unless "adding GCC support" means creating ABI compatibility, the answer to your question should be obvious.
Member since:2005-07-06
Starting from June 2005 and within the next 0..3 months GCC support should be added to OpenSolaris.
So my question is: why ``waste time" to try KDE to build with Solaris compiler ?
Officially added as part of the project perhaps, but as of very recently it is now possible to build all of the sources with GCC using the proper "GCC Gate" sources.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Ahum. Gnome runs already on opensolaris. Before KDE. Blastwave.org.on
Yes you can run Gnome on opensolaris, but built with GCC. The same thing has been possible with KDE since the 2.x days, so that's not exatly news. What this is about is KDE built with the Sun Forte compilers(the native compilers on Solaris). Gnome does not build on opensolaris with Forte yet. Pleas RTFA.
