Guest post by CDE 2.2.1 has been released on March 1. The release includes various bugfixes, a NetBSD port and improvement for UTF-8 locales with a new Greek UTF-8 translation.
CDE 2.2.1 has been released on March 1. The release includes various bugfixes, a NetBSD port and improvement for UTF-8 locales with a new Greek UTF-8 translation.
For those reluctant to pull from git, this release makes it all up to date. We are still looking for people to try to get it working on Archlinux x86_64 and Fedora, as those platforms refuse to budge.
As always, bug reports are welcome!
Fedora and Arch… I wonder if your problems have something to do with systemd.
Not on Archlinux, at least, because it builds and runs just fine on x86 Archlinux.
Do you guys just needs packages building?
Packages are needed. The project doesn’t supply binaries but if you create one, we’ll link to it.
(There is an AUR for x86 Archlinux, for instance).
Does ANYONE care?
I do.
Would you mind sharing why?
Well, first of all in spite of people saying “noone” or “everyone” without providing an argument. It’s my pet peeve. I think we’re professional enough to keep some assertiveness in our communication.
Secondly, I personally find it interesting that the project which sparked KDE (it’s name was intended as a wordplay on the CDE) is still maintained, at least at it’s glacial pace. Together with still existing development of WindowMaker it gives some perspective on window managers in general, and their progress.
Call me old fashioned, but I find that fascinating. Also, I still use WM on my older laptop.
I find those phrases to be incredibly useful for quickly distinguishing technology enthusiasts who know what they’re talking about, from the bro-tastic-hipster wannabes. Whenever I encounter an online comment that includes the term “noone,” my brain automatically search-replaces it with the words “this post was written by a semi-literate moron, everything in it can (and probably should) be disregarded.”
The rudeness above notwithstanding, really, I would be interested to know. What sort of systems and software uses CDE today?
Solaris?
Solaris only versions prior to 11. HP-UX, AIX and OpenVMS use CDE.
I believe the last time I touched it was version 8 or 9. I knew they had the Java Desktop which was pretty much Gnome 2
I do. Despite it’s aesthetic deficiency, CDE is a robust desktop with a lot of history behind it. For a time, it defined the Unix desktop in a way that was exclusively Unix, before the major DEs became poor copies of Windows or MacOS.
I miss the older versions of XFCE that operated like CDE, rather than the Gnome2 work-alike that it mostly is now.
Yes. Why? Because, as Thom very nicely explains, CDE is the best user interface:
http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE
I would love to have a fully ICCCM and EWMH compliant installation of CDE, BLAZINGLY fast, ROCK solid stable, fully featured, does what’s it’s supposed to and GETS OUT OF MY WAY.
And finally, a favorite feature of mine, no taskbar. I stinkin’ hate taskbars!
A classic case of one man’s meat…
I love taskbars, tolerate dockbars (aka what Ubuntu has), and don’t like the “iconify” concept Solaris has, where in order to find a window that is under a maximized window you have to type keyboard shortcuts or mimimize the maxmimized window on top.
On Solaris, I always avoided maximizing windows and tried to keep all windows visible.
See, I ‘ve learned the click somewhere->go to the window you want procedure.
Yes the “Iconify Windows” concept is the one you either love or hate. You don’t have to use CDE to see it. Just start up X-Org with default TWM and there you have it – the iconified windows. Once you get used to it, it becomes quite productive as you have a whole desktop to clutter with icons of minimized windows. and none of the application icons are one the way
That of course assumes that the default state is all windows minimized and when you need something you activate that particular window. When done, minimize it and select another window. Indeed quite different workflow.
I prefer the iconified windows myself. First on Olvwm, then MWM and now CDE. I find it an efficient way to work, however it is not for everyone but CDE will not get a taskbar.
In Window Maker, iconified windows can still be cycled through with Alt-Tab. What’s the big fuss?
Middle click on the title bar to push the window “back” (including full screen windows).
That’s cool. It sounds like your method of using a computer is fast and efficient too.
Thanks. Although I don’t have a CDE to try it because we upgraded from Solaris 9 to Debian.
I also believe there is a “show desktop” keyboard shortcut in CDE, but I don’t know what it is. Showing desktop would be much easier than pushing back all maximized windows when having one editor window at the back and 4 maxmimized windows on top of it, lol.
This is a classic case of knowing your audience. Sun thought people buying a Solaris workstation are professionals who wouldn’t mind reading a bit about how the window manager worked, so not everything has to be a click away. Microsoft thought that oridnary Windows users don’t read window manager guides (a correct assumption IMO) so let’s put everything within a click’s reach, taskbar it is.
PS: What I used to do with a new maximized window in CDE is move it a bit to the right, so all windows below are visible, lol (yes, CDE allows you to move maximized windows)
Edited 2014-03-05 11:47 UTC
I believe CDE is ICCM complaint already but don’t quote me. EWMH support is on the do list, I believe. I find CDE fast and rock stable myself but I’m a bit biased.
The first priority is cleaning up the code base and deprecating stuff that isn’t needed (I’m looking at you rpcbind).
There will NOT be a taskbar or any kind of system tray as I far as I am concerned because there are simply so many options out there. I use stalone tray myself.
I assume that the goal of the development team is to keep the CDE functionality as is and not adding any “modern” stuff to it. The point of CDE is the old-schoolness so it must remain clean of any modern day stuff and should be limited exclusevly to original CDE features/behavior. The code base can of course be modern but the UI, functionality and features must remain as is without any additions.
Some additions would be nice.
Like, background slideshow, and including the Freedesktop menu list within the Application Manager.
CDE seems to have stood still for the past several years (Correct me if I’m wrong, though), and I see nothing objectionable to including some of the changes that have been happening to the wider DE landscape.
CDE did come out when there wasn’t a whole lot of expectation on what a DE should do, but 20 years have passed since the initial release – people do have certain expectations now, and some should be satisfied. This can be done without negatively affecting CDE’s unique character.
The Freedesktop menu support is a feature that has been requested. I’m not sure of the status.
You know you can have slide now, right?
https://launchpad.net/slidewall
You can set the backdrop to “none” in CDE and use any background setter you want.
All the cool kids do!
I’m pretty glad I’m not that cool.
a lot of bad memories of using CDE on Solaris in the late 90s. It was akward, it was slow, and it was ugly. I especially loathed that yellow “LED” that seemed to flash forever when you tried to open a drawer or start an application.
I prefered OpenWindows, since that was only akward and ugly 🙂
It was first with KDE 1.0, and especially KDE 1.1, that i found that unix/linux was not painful to use with a GUI.
It was undeniably ugly. I personally didn’t find it slow, but I guess that’s subjective.
What I remember about it most is it ALWAYS behaved. It Never ever did something unexpected, or pop something up I didn’t ask it to.
We have shifted to an age where everything feels it should notify you of everything at all times. I liked the more more understated way CDE worked.
If I were given the choice of using it now though… at work I might be tempted, at home, no way.
When building on FreeBSD 10.0, it craps out really early in make World. Maybe it has a problem with clang? I’ll have to spin up a 9.2 VM tomorrow and give it a go.
CDE doesn’t build with Clang, as I documented here. Use gcc instead.
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/FreeBSDBuild/
Tried yesterday to build it on FreeBSD 10 and FreeBSD 9. Both failed unfortunately during CDE make world. OpenBSD wasn’t better, I was lead to understand it needs -current branch to compile there (due to some perl and gettext issues). So if anyone has better installation guide available, I’d give it a go
Well, A fresh 9.2 install (in a vm) worked for me on AMD64.
Not sure if it makes a difference, but I switched to pkgng and installed the listed packages that way rather than the old pkg_add method. I haven’t checked to see if the pkgng tools pull packages from the same default location as the old pkg_* on 9.2 or not.
I think it doesn’t, though – the old pkg_* by default grabs packages that are built from whichever ports tree ships with each release, while pkgng seems to pull from a repo that keeps current with the latest ports tree.
At least, I think so. Since the laptop I use for, well, everything, uses hybrid Intel/NVidia graphics, FreeBSD isn’t really an option.
Bumblebee hasn’t really been ported. There is an existing FreeBSD version somebody cobbled together, but it’s quite old. I guess the only thing FreeBSD specific is the kernel module that handles power management for activating/deactivating power to the NVidia chip, but VirtualGL doesn’t easily build on *BSD – which is odd, because on Linux and Solaris it relies on libBSD, which is a library that provides certain BSD-centric features on non-BSD systems.
EDIT: Here’s a pic of it running and looking all Unixy:
http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p89/drumhellar/FreeBSD92-2014-03…
Edited 2014-03-05 07:51 UTC
Hmm. Interesting. I’ll give it a go with amd64, I tried i386 for 9.2. 10 was amd64.
Did you follow the FreeBSD instructions?
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/FreeBSDBuild/
Yes, of course
Amazing. Following the same guide and installing everything (except CDE itself) via pkgng works just fine
Currently tested on FBSD9-amd64.
Edited 2014-03-05 20:14 UTC
I’ll make a note on the wiki about pkgng.
I am really glad to see the progress on CDE port. CDE is a very important part of computer history and to this day, the CDE defines the serious big unix box synonym for me. I’ve dreamed running CDE on my everyday machine forever. It makes me feel hardcore unix guru for some reason. However I use Windows on my everyay life and I still have to get some linux/BSD up and get the CDE a go.
As most people have horrible memories about CDE from their university’s Solaris class, I have VERY fond memories of it from the AIX boxes I had at work. AIX is a really cool proprietary Unix and would like to have an RS/6000 box in the corner. It is so cool
I didn’t enjoy it much. I used to Run Suse 9.2 at the time and going to Solaris was quite painful with most of the GNU stuff missing.
In 2004 when suse 9.2 was released the GNU tools was included and supported in Solaris, because of the similarity of many of the tools and also other issues with mandatory standards compliance that needed to be upheld in the solaris operating environment the GNU tools was available under /usr/sfw and not in the regular binary directory. (/usr/xpg4/bin is the path if you chose the behavior required by POSIX.1–2001) But yes they were mostly all there by then.
We did a lot of our labs in “zones” so they may not have been available. TBH I used those machines as a compiler for my Java coursework and not a lot more.
It was sad when at work we moved from sunos and olvwm over to solaris and cde. A lot of things about CDE never clicked for me, especially the dock and some other settings. Unless things have substantially changed since then I’m liking xfce most on laptops and then windowmaker on my hardcore dev machines.
ΕυχαÏιστοÏμε πολÏ! (Thank you very much!)
I shall test it asap!
At least CDE lets you choose colors. I guess the Unity or Gnome3 argument is that letting users choose window colors would confuse them.
Its beyond ridiculous that you need to install third party software (tweak tools) just to do something that I could do in Windows 3.0 like change colors.
Have not used CDE in a while, but took a look at the screenshots on sourceforge, and considering looking at Unity and Gnome3, it really makes me wonder what we’ve gained in the last 15 years,
You can even create your own!
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Creating%20A%20Pa…
We are back to simple desktop like CDE. Because it works.
It was tough for me to use on Solaris in the late 90s coming from win95 and fvwm95. In fact Solaris was tough to use as a Linux user back then as already mentioned here earlier. Nearly 20 years ago for me, gee how time flies.