LXer reports that Sun has made an evaluation copy of their Java Desktop System 2 available for download. Ever faithful, OSDir provides screenshot zen.
Sun JDS Evaluation Available
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Looks like the old browser version of gnome twisted into a “Windows XP wearing shades” look and running on Suse.
Don’t be afraid of Gnome 2.8 and spatial nautilus!
Don’t be afraid of the default panels!
Don’t be afraid of putting some links onto the panels for easy launching vs. forcing everyone to go through the launch/start crap!
When I read a recent article saying Gnome was like Windows (vs. KDE not) I nearly fell over. I suppose it’s this kind of monkeying by Sun that gives that impression.
These Windows rip-offs are like sugar-free cookies for dieters. You might as well find some other way to satisfy your craving because the monkeyed version just won’t satisfy.
The latest evaluation version of Solaris 10 incorporates JDS as the default environment. Quite impressive, IMO, with even printing now easy to setup (good printing under Solaris? Did hell freeze over?).
Solaris 10 has some seriously good stuff in it, and JDS is just the icing on the cake, btw.
I guess that I’m not the last person who will comment this, but I really think they should get a better design and choose more appealing colors.
The first impression is very important… Even if it’s what’s on the inside that matters…
”
Solaris 10 has some seriously good stuff in it, and JDS is just the icing on the cake, btw. ”
agreed that solaris tends to have better stuff in 10 but a ugly fork of gnome is not one of the good features
<<a ugly fork of gnome is not one of the good features>>
Again you call it a “fork”. How is it a fork? I confronted you before about this and you gave me nothing to backup your claim.
I don’t se an advantage in JDS.
I’m a “theme making/tweaking dork” (I have several with respectable ratings on gnome-look.org) and I’m quite intrigued by the rounded macosx style text entry boxes in the JDS theme. although I agree with other comments about the not so pretty overall look. (See the search field here)
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/215/52.gif
AFAIK there’s no way to do that within a theme for gtk, did they hack gtk2, does some theme engine implement it I don’t know of? Anyone know what the trick is? I’d like to add that single detail to a couple themes in the works.
“I don’t se an advantage in JDS.”
That depends on whether you value Sun as a company. One good thing is that JDS will be the common UI across their Solaris and Linux offerings, and they sell and support Linux on x86 and Solaris on x86 and SPARC. If you like “one stop shopping” they compete directly with HP and IBM on this front. In this particular way, Sun isn’t competing with SuSE or Red Hat at all (with these you have to have third-party integrators like Dell).
impression is important in a non work environment. if that werent the case, i would be using a mac here. anyone who is using an enterprise workstation is most definately not going to care about how stuff looks.
suse and jds are not comparable, and its pretty funny that was even mentioned. if you want a comparison, look at the redhat enterprise desktop. stability and security are at the top of the list for an enterprise os, which is far from the case in a desktop os where crashes are a bit more acceptable. desktop distros will run bleeding edge versions of software to give the best experience possible, enterprise distros will run the most stable versions.
as for gnome being a fork, thats rather silly as sun is a big gnome contributer. but im pretty sure thats a troll…
and i think pretty much every corporate distro ships a windows-ized gnome. keep in mind retraining is already an issue, you want to keep things as familiar as possible.
Again you call it a “fork”. How is it a fork?
—
read about sun employees blogging about how gnome translations and many other parts of the gnome infrastructure isnt not useful to sun jds because it has forked in many places esp with regards to look and feel and I am not just talking about changing panel arrangements and cosmetic things.
ther are several aspects of this change
1| new code to change the UI and formats
2) new patches to change almost every file location esp in the /usr and stuff
3) changes to libraries. this is one of the reasons sun does not support gnome as a development platform in solaris as a ISV
Sun has started to work with the community on these things but solaris 10 wouldnt feature this coordinated work if ever
<<1| new code to change the UI and formats >>
What? So your saying by altering the UI (in the case of JDS, a new panel applet and an ugly theme), it becomes a fork?
Xandros is a fork of KDE(start button)?
Ubuntu is a fork of Gnome(menu structure)?
RH forked Gnome(bluecurve/panel on botton to resemble KDE)?
…
That makes no sense.
<<2) new patches to change almost every file location esp in the /usr and stuff>>
Which Sun is pushing into Gnome. It’s a mess right now.
GNOME Namespace Management – ARC & GNOME
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-December/msg…
SUSE also stores all their DE info in /opt/. They are a fork also?
<<3) changes to libraries. this is one of the reasons sun does not support gnome as a development platform in solaris as a ISV>>
Sun made it clear, that in the future their customers may demand that apps they created using Gnome-libs work on future versions of JDS. Gnome/OSS does a horrible job at API/ABI stability and you can’t rely on them. Thats why Sun encourages their customers not to rely on Gnome as their platform.
JDS is plain ugly, or so-so at best. I don’t know why they are bothering with this, but if these guys want to be taken seriously in the workstation/desktop market, they better hire some serious graphic/UI guys .
i wonder why sun hires so many gnome developers if they are using such an old version of gnome.
that must be 2.4, if not olderd, deciding from screenshots.
why are they doing that?
What is jDS? Some kind of linux distro or desktop enviroment only?, really i don’t know.
Arrrgh, what is it with these people…*sigh*
linux_baby: As others on this post have already stated (please read), whether it looks “cool” or has “eyecandy” is *very* low down on the list of priorities. Things like stability, reliability, lowered cost of training, consistentcy across all your systems etc. are much more important.
Besides, I for one don’t care how a DE looks as long as it’s consistent, provides feedback, is well-thought out and reasonably polished. That’s why I didn’t actually mind CDE (except for the fact that you have to click again to close menus from the Front Panel – anybody know how to change this behaviour huh?)
joeuser: Ever wondered why so many organisations are using old VMS boxes? (for example, I know for a fact that the Reserve Bank of Australia still uses them) Or why so many web servers use Debian Stable? Or why older versions of Solaris (eg 8) remain the top choice among F100 companies?
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html
Silly linux fanboys think that enterprise have exactly the same needs as their “oh-look, it’s so cool” linux boxes…
bye,
Victor
OMG!! Is this 2005??? It looks like Win3.11 all over again!!
I have seen Gnome, i know it does not have to be that ugly!! In fact the Gnome version running on my RedHat box at work looks and works really great! What are they thinking??
Why oh why???
Can’t someone please help them out! There are people out there who are forced to work on these machines (Im one!!) – SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!!
BR/jens
Victor Hooi (IP: —.nsw.bigpond.net.au)
You know Victor, a desktop environment is about the desktop. An australian server is not, neither is that debian box you talk about.
The big question here is why oh why and how is it possible for sun to hire all these gnome devs and then deliver …that!!!? cost reduction?? eeh?? consitency yes, but I’d rather go with OpenWindows than that messed up sun-gnome! yeah! a linux X version of OpenWindows – now that would be something!!
If a giant like sun is making an effort you would expect more wouldn’t you…??
br/jens
the only reason why i use windows is the draggable and moveable toolbars (like in IE you can do with the cursor)
and.. there’s a lot of APPS that will install and just download into a programs directory and creates cool lil icons in the toolbara nd desktop. not many applications do that in linux.
”
What? So your saying by altering the UI (in the case of JDS, a new panel applet and an ugly theme), it becomes a fork?
”
i guess you didnt read my post entirely
“Xandros is a fork of KDE(start button)? ”
xandros has changed much more than a start button. they have a completely new filemanager. yes thats a fork.
“Ubuntu is a fork of Gnome(menu structure)?
RH forked Gnome(bluecurve/panel on botton to resemble KDE)?
… ”
no. these both are cosmetic changes. ubuntu is pushing their changes upstream. read desktop-devel list for details
fc3 has reverted to the upstream arrangement. so that point is now irrelevant anyway
“Which Sun is pushing into Gnome. It’s a mess right now. ”
I dont think its a mess. if its a mess sun is partly responsible for it since they have been participating in the development for atleast a couple of years
“SUSE also stores all their DE info in /opt/. They are a fork also? ”
again. this is actually a fhs problem being vague about stuff. sun changes much more than mere locations. read the post in full
”
Sun made it clear, that in the future their customers may demand that apps they created using Gnome-libs work on future versions of JDS.”
where has sun made it clear. any links?
“Gnome/OSS does a horrible job at API/ABI stability and you can’t rely on them.”Thats why Sun encourages their customers not to rely on Gnome as their platform. ”
first gnome/oss is a wrong terminology since they arent interchangable and Gnome and GTk has full api/api stability in every major revision. moreover they are parellely installable with previous versions. so you dont know what you are talking about
if Sun cannot rely on OSS why participate in the community.what about x.org. what about openoffice. what about SUN os that was based on BSD? Sun cant rely on OSS?. stop spewing utter crap like that
”
linux_baby: As others on this post have already stated (please read), whether it looks “cool” or has “eyecandy” is *very* low down on the list of priorities.”
no. victor. if its a purely server platform then what you are telling others is true. once Sun starts marketing JDS then they better make it look good. looking good is one of the TOP of priorities for something like JDS. avoid making poor excuses for ugly looks
>The big question here is why oh why and how is it possible for sun >to hire all these gnome devs and then deliver …that!!!? cost reduction?? eeh?? consitency yes, but I’d rather go with OpenWindows than that messed up sun-gnome! yeah! a linux X version of OpenWindows – now that would be something!!
> If a giant like sun is making an effort you would expect more wouldn’t you…??
I’m getting sick and tired of these idiotic comments from some anal-retentive jerks supporting RedHat and scoffing at anything Sun is putting out. The immaturity of this sort of croud tops the charts when they readily dismiss the whole UI just on the quality of icons or the selected theme shown in the screenshot. JDS is a fine looking desktop environment that is still themeable and customizable — want to make it look like Fedora, just apply the damn theme. I’ve tried JDS and it is a very nice well integrated system that makes it easy to replace Windows. May be it is time to lay off all idiotic stuff with “I don’t trust Sun”, from all tier 1 vendors Sun is the biggest contributor to X.org, Gnome, and OpenOffice — practically the only reasons Linux (and other Unix OS’s) make any inroads on the desktop.
You ppl need to lay off the Jolt Cola. Seriously.
rom all tier 1 vendors Sun is the biggest contributor to X.org, Gnome
—-
thats incorrect. x.org has a large number of contributions from many other vendors. sun definitely isnt the largest contributor here. prove me wrong if you can
gnome has many more contributions from redhat and novell. this is a indisputable fact.
“I’m getting sick and tired of these idiotic comments from some anal-retentive jerks supporting RedHat”
the fact is that you are guy bringing in redhat here. why are sun guys so obssessed with redhat and spreading lies about redhat being a proprietary distro and not lsb compliant. ?
I’m getting sick and tired of these idiotic comments from some anal-retentive jerks supporting RedHat and scoffing at anything Sun is putting out. The immaturity of this sort of croud tops the charts when they readily dismiss the whole UI just on the quality of icons or the selected theme shown in the screenshot. JDS is a fine looking desktop environment that is still themeable and customizable — want to make it look like Fedora, just apply the damn theme. I’ve tried JDS and it is a very nice well integrated system that makes it easy to replace Windows. May be it is time to lay off all idiotic stuff with “I don’t trust Sun”, from all tier 1 vendors Sun is the biggest contributor to X.org, Gnome, and OpenOffice — practically the only reasons Linux (and other Unix OS’s) make any inroads on the desktop.
Dude! Even though you managed to copy paste my posting you didn’t read through half of it did you!?
Never and nowhere did i say i prefer redhat to sun/solaris. I think i said Im one of the peoples working on a sun machine!?
Can’t someone please help them out! There are people out there who are forced to work on these machines (Im one!!)
…yeah i did. And for your info I work as a java developer (telecom) and next to my RedHat based i386 sits a Sun Solaris Ultra10. I like am both.
As you say Sun is a big player in open source / *nix projects. And that is why I expect more than what JDS is today!!
br/jens (Im on green tea)
> thats incorrect. x.org has a large number of contributions from many other vendors. sun definitely isnt the largest contributor here. prove me wrong if you can
Sun and HP are the biggest contributors to X.org, I’m not sure who gets the crown in respect to the amount of code contributed though, but I would most certainly bet on Sun — HP’s contributions to OSS have been historically measly.
> gnome has many more contributions from redhat and novell. this is a indisputable fact.
It is not the number of contributors that matters, but rather the amount of code that was committed into the source tree. Core Gnome source maintainers rate Sun as one of the top contributors and I’m taking their word for it.
Yes, sunw has great technology, yadda yadda.
But, sunw was financially supporting scox in scox’s efforts to ruin Linux. Sunw in now in bed with msft. Sunw has always been ambivilant towards anything that runs on an x86. Sunw’s Linux, at best, is nothing special. And they call it “Java Desktop” as if it’s something they developed, as if it has something to do with Java.
Linux competes against sunw’s important flagship solaris. So sunw talks non-sense about how linux is only useful for a desktop, not a server.
I know sunw has contributed a lot UNIX, and to F/OSS, and sunw has some great technology. But, for Linux, I think I’ll go elsewhere.
JMHO.
Sun and HP are the biggest contributors to X.org, I’m not sure who gets the crown in respect to the amount of code contributed though, but I would most certainly bet on Sun
—
so you are unsure about this. lets claim things when we are sure about it
“It is not the number of contributors that matters, but rather the amount of code that was committed into the source tree”
i am betting on this too. core sun gnome developers would of course rate their contributions high.if you have any exact statistics then I am very interested. till then please stop making claims that they are the largest contributors
“why are sun guys so obssessed with redhat and spreading lies about redhat being a proprietary distro and not lsb compliant.”
It isn’t a matter of Red Hat being proprietary, technically, it’s a matter of it being proprietary in practice. People will claim that linux is linux is linux, but the fact of the matter is that something configured and built to run on Red Hat doesn’t mean it will run, unchanged, on Debian or SuSE or other distributions. Often, the amount of work required to move between Linux distributions is equivalent to the amount of work requried to move to/from Solaris or other UNIX. Kernel versions may not agree or library versions may not agree, it’s just a plain fact that moving from one platform (distribution) to another can be a PITA. In this way, Linux just isn’t a panacea of the balance sheet. Jonathan Schwartz may be doing some flame-baiting, here, but the basic premise of his arguments is sound.
“But, sunw was financially supporting scox in scox’s efforts to ruin Linux. Sunw in now in bed with msft.”
Holy cow, you have been taken by the Slashdot trolls hook, line, and sinker. First, the deal with SCO was to satisfy Sun’s lawyers with respect to IP in Solaris. It was a legal formality (UNIX’ history is long, complex, and sometimes ugly). Sun’s deal with Microsoft is the same thing (Microsoft gives a couple billion to Sun, Sun lays off suing Microsoft this round). Fact: SCO are scum, and Sun doesn’t pursue those kinds of strategies. Fact: Sun is no friend of Microsoft and would love to see Longhorn collect dust on shelves everywhere.
Please, don’t believe everything you read on Slashdot.
It isn’t a matter of Red Hat being proprietary, technically, it’s a matter of it being proprietary in practice.
—–
no. technically its open source and the Jonathan is lying blatantly about it. politically you can view it howeover you want to. I dont care
“People will claim that linux is linux is linux, but the fact of the matter is that something configured and built to run on Red Hat doesn’t mean it will run, unchanged, on Debian or SuSE or other distributions”
there is a difference between a kernel and a distribution and this has nothing to do with redhat being proprietary or not.
”
Jonathan Schwartz may be doing some flame-baiting, here, but the basic premise of his arguments is sound. ”
jonathan is blatantly lying and unless he stops lying I am not hearing any poor excuses for it.
I am prepared to hear arguments about deviations in distributions. I am NOT prepared to hear Jonathan tell me that redhat is a proprietary distro and that it is not lsb compliant. show me a single proprietary software in redhat enterprise linux or fedora or else just stop this silly lies
“OMG!! Is this 2005??? It looks like Win3.11 all over again!!”
You ever use Windows 3.11? I have and it looks nothing like JDS. Trust me, we would have killed for something this nice back when Win 3.11 was out.
Now it won’t steal me away from Fedora Core 3, but it’s not targeted at me either. Can’t be everything to everyone. They have a target in mind and it’s not us. Deal with it.
please type up a report about it and then post it, extremely detailed.
and when you do it, do not be one-sided. lets pretend your a step up in college.
You ever use Windows 3.11?
Yes i have. Im an old fart.
But these days Im an old fart with money. I can now afford machBSDAqua machines to feast my eyes on instead of that 3.11 clone. But hmm.. those SUN’s are even more expensive!! And they are butt ugly!!
…no i don’t get it either
jens-xxxxxxx-dator:~/Programming/rss jens$ uname -a
Darwin jens-xxxx-dator.local 7.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.7.0: Sun Nov 7 16:06:51 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.9.5.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
^^^^^^^^^ Happy Happy Joy Joy!!
BR/jens
This is a desktop for productivity in an office, not a tool for a troll with to many time in their hands to change themes.
not a tool for a troll with to many time in their hands to change themes.
—
people change themes for personal preferences. if you dont understand this then you wouldnt ever under personal computing.
and when you do it, do not be one-sided. lets pretend your a step up in college.
—
whats your point.?
people change themes for personal preferences. if you dont understand this then you wouldnt ever under personal computing.
A company won’t ask to their employeers if they like the theme or not, they will ask if they are productive with it, if you are more worried about themes, then you are a troll and prolly waste to much time fooling around at work.
<<i guess you didnt read my post entirely>>
<QUOTE>
1| new code to change the UI and formats
</QUOTE>
What am I missing? So now your admitting your first point isn’t valid?
<<xandros has changed much more than a start button. they have a completely new filemanager. yes thats a fork.
How is a filemanager that intergrates CD/DVD burning and a start button create a fork? What consitutes a fork? Is every Linux distro considered a fork aswell, consider they vary in functionality and appearance? Wow we have over 300 forks of Linux!
<<ubuntu is pushing their changes upstream>>
Do you have a link? So now, if a fork is created but it MAY get included upstream, its not considered a fork anymore?Um…yeah nice logic.
<<fc3 has reverted to the upstream arrangement. so that point is now irrelevant anyway>>
RH is not in charge of the Fedora Core project anymore. They made it clear that its a community project. RH’s Desktop offering is still arranaged in that manner.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/
<<sun changes much more than mere locations. read the post in full>>
You want me to back up your claim? No, thats not how it works. You give me quotes or you’ve got nothing.
<<if its a mess sun is partly responsible for it since they have been participating in the development for atleast a couple of years>>
LMAO so now your blaming Sun? They are trying to work with the Gnome community to fix these problems. Problems that arose from bad management, and considering RH has much more visible Gnome influence, I’m going to blame them. Yup, damn RH, working with the Gnome community for so long but never got around to fixing this.
<<where has sun made it clear. any links?>>
Well heres one of many examples:
<QUOTE>
Our commitment is that a customer’s “normal” use of system facilities should not allow them to see any incompatible changes to these interfaces.Since these interfaces typically span machines by being embodied in media or protocols (and since customers cannot upgrade all their machines simultaneously), these interfaces can’t be changed with the freedom of a private interface.
</QUOTE>
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-December/msg…
<<Gnome and GTk has full api/api stability in every major revision.>>
Maybe 2years (max) of backwards compatability is good enough for you but in the real world people expect more. Show me MS style compatability( more than 10 years!), then we’ll talk.
<<moreover they are parellely installable with previous versions.>>
Let me be the first to say, HACK HACK HACK. Nice solution buddy. Your system gets pretty bloated after 5, 10, 15 yrs of being forced to install old versions of Gnome-lib. What about embedded devices, or other places where space is at a premium.
<< so you dont know what you are talking about >>
Right…
<<if Sun cannot rely on OSS why participate in the community.>>
This is about PLATFORM STABILITY!!!
<<stop spewing utter crap like that >>
What crap?
This is the ugliest Linux distribution I have ever seen.
>
First, the deal with SCO was to satisfy Sun’s lawyers with respect to IP in Solaris. It was a legal formality (UNIX’ history is long, complex, and sometimes ugly).
<
Wrong. Not even sunw, or even scox, claimed that. Sunw did not owe scox anything. Also, McNealy was parroting McBride for quite some time, about how IBM should indemnify and and all Linux users should pay scox. Sunw has since tried to distance itself from scox, but make no mistake about it: sunw was very much in bed with scox. BTW: if sunw was so innocent – as you claim – then why did sunw keep their financial contributions to scox secret for as long as sunw could? Even msft didn’t do that.
Sunw likes Linux when linux competes with windows, but hates linux when linux competes with solaris. And sunw certainly doesn’t want anything that competes with sunw’s hardware – so don’t expect a lot of x86 support from sunw.
Sunw is good for Java, and good for high-end servers, and probably good for other things. But, again, I’ll get my linux else-where.
> Also, McNealy was parroting McBride for quite some time, about how IBM should indemnify
IBM should have indemnified its own customers, which it didn’t which by the way was quite cowardly of IBM and quite confusing for the community overall. Sun on the other hand offered indemnification protection from the very beginning.
> but make no mistake about it: sunw was very much in bed with scox. BTW: if sunw was so innocent – as you claim – then why did sunw keep their financial contributions to scox secret for as long as sunw could?
This conspiracy theory sounds a lot like a bunch of crap. The only reason Sun payed SCO is to purchase the IP required to open source Solaris. Sun was doing all this work before the official announcement about Solaris being open sourced, therefore the intentions weren’t made public. Sun has/had no interest in SCO per se and meddling with Linux using SCO as a proxy.
“linux_baby: As others on this post have already stated (please read), whether it looks “cool” or has “eyecandy” is *very* low down on the list of priorities. Things like stability, reliability, lowered cost of training, consistentcy across all your systems etc. are much more important.”
Er, so in that case, why spend the money to make an *ugly* theme? If appearance isn’t important, use the standard theme and save yer money. If appearance IS important, make sure the graphic designers you’re paying good money to are not, in fact, blind. Sun would appear to have fallen rather sadly between the two stools…
Sun is not a desktop computing company, it’s an enterprise system company. The point of having JDS as a layer above Linux/Solaris/Insert_Other is that you have a consistent UI across the entire enterprise, and saving on retraining costs (since it behaves similarly to Windows).
Also, what the heck do you mean by “Australian server” – when the heck did I refer to Australian servers? Perhaps you’re posting on the wrong thread, or this is a crosspost by you, because I’m completely baffled what that has to do with this topic.
“The big question here is why oh why and how is it possible for sun to hire all these gnome devs and then deliver …that!!!? cost reduction?? eeh?? consitency yes, but I’d rather go with OpenWindows than that messed up sun-gnome! yeah! a linux X version of OpenWindows – now that would be something!!”
Perhaps my english is different to yours, but I only seemed to understand every second word of the last sentence. However, from what I gather, here is my reply:
Sun is a *service* company – you’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for the support – hence the per-employee/per-customer pricing scheme. This is a smarter scheme both in terms of a more representative price-tag, as well as improving the bottom line.
Bye,
Victor
“joeuser: Ever wondered why so many organisations are using old VMS boxes? (for example, I know for a fact that the Reserve Bank of Australia still uses them) Or why so many web servers use Debian Stable? Or why older versions of Solaris (eg 8) remain the top choice among F100 companies?”
Well, I can’t speak for any of them, but I can tell you why Shaw Cable still runs their entire cable system off a more-than-twenty-year-old database implemented on IBM mainframes, which everyone in the entire company communicates with using telnet and which collapses on a regular basis – because the damn thing is so heavily plumbed into the physical infrastructure that they’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to replace it for years. Is that a reason? Yes. Is it a *good* one that indicates that old code is somehow better? No, it’s a cock-up…
Why do you guys keep making the same, pointless arguments?
If you want to dicuss JDS, why not do so on its technical merits, rather than the rather shallow and silly statements along the lines of “oh my god, it looks soooo ugly…”.
JDS is an *enterprise* system – the point is to have consistency, reliability, stability, easy updating (compare Solaris patches to RH Update Agent) and save on retraining costs.
“looking good is one of the TOP of priorities for something like JDS.”
I’m sorry, but this illustrates that you have a very poor understanding of what JDS is about, or what it’s aims are.
From what I can gather (Sun devs, please correct me if I’m wrong), priorities include
1. Interopeability: JDS is designed to be fully interopable with things like MS Office, MS Exchange, LDAP, messaging systems , network filesystems, network printers etc.
2. Work with Existing Stuff (i.e. Windows): This negates the need for staff to retrain all over again on a new system. Some people don’t care how it looks, as long as its easy to use, and it does what they expect it to (ie *predictable*) – no weird surprises, as is often the case in Linux (though I myself like the odd surprise *grin*)
3. Providing easy-to-use administrative/developer tools, centralised management, automated and secure software updates that are *tested*.
Sun has a good record for providing updates that work well, don’t break stuff and can be easily rolled back if necessary – compare this to the nightmare that is the RH Update Agent. (And don’t talk to be about yum/apt-get and all that – enterprises want something that they can roll out and have it work, without having to hire technicians to spend hours hacking around to add unsupported additional software just to get updates.)
4. Low TOC, with cost-per-employee licensing.
From Sun themeselves, JDS is meant to be “Full featured…”, “Easy to Use and Learn”, “Tightly integrated and tuned desktop client”, “intuitive” etc.
Nowhere in there does the word “looks good” occur.
Besdies, “looking good” is subjective – what looks good to you might not look good to your CIO. I mean, take Window XP and Lunx – many people *hate* it, and prefer the look of Widnows 2003. So if you were a company like Microsoft or Sun, what would you do?
Personally, I liked the look of CDE, yet many people will disagree with me. I thought it was easy on the eyes, didn’t jump out at you, and didn’t get in the way of you doing what you had to do.
Bye,
Victor
Eric: When will the technology be publicly available?
Paul Byrne: A developer release has been available since June this year. All source is available. We don’t have any firm time scales for release of a full product, although we have committed to having elements in JDS 5.
Handley: What are your current plans to integrate with JDS? Do you have a time frame? Or are there other partners that will take this to market?
Hideya Kawahara: We are still in an early planning stage, but we hope JDS 5 will include some elements of Project Looking Glass.
http://java.sun.com/developer/community/chat/JavaLive/2004/jl1026.h…
Anonymous has his it spot on – as he said, a company doesn’t really care how their desktops looks, they care whether their employees are more productive on them.
Company A: Hah, take that, our desktops are like, so much *cooler* looking than yours.
Company B: Yeah, so? Take a look at your stock price, then take a look at ours…
If you think it’s ugly, change the theme (I’m sure you know how to at least do that). Then again, I have a feeling you’re one of those idiots at work who spend hours changing their wallpaper/screensaver/icons/themes etc.
Personally, I never saw the point of all that. Even under windows, I just use the stock icons, default wallpaper (bliss), and don’t bother with a screensaver (monitor auto shutdown to save power anyway).
Sure, I went through the whole window-blinds/litestep/aqua-theme phase when I was younger, but I’m not a little kid anymore.
If you want to sound a little mature, why don’t you detail your post with a bit about what you don’t like about JDS.
Button placement? Colour Scheme? UI consistencency?
So far, nobody seems to have mentioned anything of any worth except just “oh god, it looks ugly…my linux box looks so much cooler”.
For a more mature and systematic analysis, read one of the articles on UI design, or the Gnome HIG (which coincidentally Sun is largely responsible for), or even stuff by the Plan9 guys from Lucent.
Ahh, those were the days, when people who coded things were *engineers*, and actually bothered researching stuff and innovating instead of just leeching features and throwing everything in except the kitchen sink.
From the Plan9 Faq:
the color scheme is (obviously) deliberate. The intent was to build on an observation by Edward Tufte that the human system likes nature and nature is full of pale colors, so something you’re going to look at all day might best serve if it were also in relaxing shades. Renee French helped me with the specifics of the color scheme (she’s a professional illustrator and my color vision is suspect), once I’d figured out how I wanted it to look.
Having used other systems with different approaches to color screens, most especially Windows XP (extra pukey), I think Tufte was right.
Bye,
Victor
You have valid points i guess.
As a java developer for one of the major telecom companies i agree that it is not so much about eye-candy, it is about stability and performance. I work on Sun workstations and servers on a daily basis and have been doing so for the past five years.
All Im saying is that when Sun finally makes an effort to move away from butt-ugly CDE to Gnome (which in my opinion looks good in its default out-of-the-box form) they for some wierd reason manages to completely screw it up visually. And at that im dissapointed.
My OpenWin rant was mostly a joke but if it was up to me I’d rather Sun made a OpenWin version for linux than them making that gnome for Solaris! To make myself even clearer on this point: I prefer OpenWin both in looks and handlig to that sad Sun-version of Gnome.
Regarding price-tags and Sun’s buizness I will not comment.
br/jens
Hi,
Thanks for being such a decent bloke and making an objective and honest post – it’s great when people remain civilised and attack arguments, rather than the individual making them. The last time I posted on another news item, it denigrated into a immature foot-stamping and shouting match, so your response is a refreshing change.
I in turn will concede that you probably have a point that OpenWin/CDE is better than JDS-themed Gnome, although I’m probably weird in that I actually thought CDE looked nice since it was so clean and well laid out. And yes, Sun might have included a more “beautiful” (beauty being subjective) and out-there (ie unconventional and less business-y) eyecandy theme as an alternative to the standard one, although this might have confused users.
Also, from somebody experienced in Sun, could you recommend any good documents/books for getting started? (I’ve played around with Solaris 10 for a while, but I’d like a nice chunky book to learn the ins and outs).
Bye,
Victor
Also, from somebody experienced in Sun, could you recommend any good documents/books for getting started? (I’ve played around with Solaris 10 for a while, but I’d like a nice chunky book to learn the ins and outs).
http://docs.sun.com/
Lots of Sun’s blueprints, the solaris free ebook (who used to be hosted @ sunhelp.org, though dunno if its still only)…
just do a google on “Solaris FILETYPE:pdf” and you are on it
.
s/only/online
i think “lunch” key instead of “launch” looks better near sun logo
>
IBM should have indemnified its own customers, which it didn’t which by the way was quite cowardly of IBM and quite confusing for the community overall. Sun on the other hand offered indemnification protection from the very beginning.
<
Why should IBM have indemnified against a completely bogus assertion? That would have done nothing but add credability to scox’s absurd claims. After two years scox has not filed a lawsuit against anybody for just using Linux – for scox to do so would be blantant fraud, and scox execs would find themselves faced with criminal charges. Why should IBM play scox’s game? Of course sunw offered indemnification, that was the part of the racket. McNealy said something like: “of we’re thrilled to offer the only legal version of linux” – while slyly winking towards McBride.
>
This conspiracy theory sounds a lot like a bunch of crap. The only reason Sun payed SCO is to purchase the IP required to open source Solaris.
<
First it’s not a theory. If it sounds like a bunch of crap to you, then you simply do not know the facts. Sunw has not, and can not legally open source Solaris no matter what scox claims. Even *if* scox owned UNIX (which scox doesn’t) open sourcing any system V would violate contracts with IBM, HP, and SGI, amoung others.
>
Sun was doing all this work before the official announcement about Solaris being open sourced, therefore the intentions weren’t made public. Sun has/had no interest in SCO per se and meddling with Linux using SCO as a proxy.
<
I’m sure sunw gave scox all of those millions just to be nice.
What am I missing? So now your admitting your first point isn’t valid?
—
no. i am merely pointing out that you havent bothered to read my post completely
“Do you have a link? So now, if a fork is created but it MAY get included upstream, its not considered a fork anymore?Um…yeah nice logic.”
ya mere cosmetic changes that are pushed upstream are not forks anymore.
“RH is not in charge of the Fedora Core project anymore.”
when every package in fedora core is managed by redhat employees you pretty much proved my point that you dont know what you are talking about. run away now
“Let me be the first to say, HACK HACK HACK”
no. virtually every operating system does it. windows,solaris, linux, freebsd, whatever
“Well heres one of many examples: ”
that doesnt say anythin about compatibility with gnome and jds. show me the real pudding. jds in its present state is NOT compatible
“Show me MS style compatability( more than 10 years!), then we’ll talk. ”
i was talking about a toolkit. you are talking about a company which added compatiblity cruft while doing parallel installations of libraries which you have already called a hack. either you support it or you dont
“What crap?”
crap like fedora core is not managed by redhat anymore. point out a SINGLE package in ANY release of fedora core not managed by redhat employees. then we will talk.
First it’s not a theory. If it sounds like a bunch of crap to you, then you simply do not know the facts. Sunw has not, and can not legally open source Solaris no matter what scox claims. Even *if* scox owned UNIX (which scox doesn’t) open sourcing any system V would violate contracts with IBM, HP, and SGI, amoung others.
Interesting, so do you work on Sun’s legal team which
is responsible for making sure we can release OpenSolaris?
I strongly suspect that you do not.
In which case you have no clue about what actually
happened and why it happened regarding Sun’s purchase of
device driver code from SCOX.
All you are doing is spreading FUD and suffering from the
usual slashdotter failing of being unable to read and
understand publicly available text which backs up claims
that Sun made at the time.
Interesting, so do you work on Sun’s legal team which
is responsible for making sure we can release OpenSolaris?
—-
are you?. in that case why dont you conclusively tell us otherwise.
everybody is free to form opinions from whatever sources they have. sun legal team isnt the only factor here and you should be well aware of that. dont try to shut down opinions especially if you planning on open sourcing anything
>
Interesting, so do you work on Sun’s legal team which
is responsible for making sure we can release OpenSolaris?
<
Why would I have to work on Sun’s legal team to know that sunw won’t opensource solaris? For starters, even sunw now admits they don’t plan to open all of solaris. Sunw simply does not have the legal right to open source System V UNIX, which Solaris is still partially based on. And scox can not give sunw that right. Sun has been claiming that they are going to open source solaris for about seven years now. Sunw usually claims this after a competitor announces a new product.
Besides, it’s only common sense. Consider this, you are HP, you pay many millions for a sysV license, then some other sysV licensee turns around and open sources sysV. Suddenly, you sysV license is worth $0.00. That is way HP (and IBM and SGI, etc) have made damn good and sure that their contract does allow any such open sourcing.
>
In which case you have no clue about what actually
happened and why it happened regarding Sun’s purchase of
device driver code from SCOX.
<
Oh please, lets put two and two together, shall we? First, notice that scox’s lawsuit and linux-license scam all happend at the same time as msft and sunw both all-of-the-sudden found it neccessare to fork over so many millions to scox.
Funny isn’t it? All those years msft and sunw didn’t need anything from scox. Then all at the same time, right after scox sued ibm and threatend the linux license thing, sunw and msft both need all those scox licenses. Funny how sunw didn’t want to talk about it. Funny how sunw’s purchase also included a boat load of warrents for scox stock – hardly a normal business transaction. Funny how McBride would say something, and McNealy would repeat it the same day.
>
failing of being unable to read and
understand publicly available text which backs up claims
that Sun made at the time.
<
I have read and understode sunw’s PR. I don’t buy a word of it. I pay more attention to the facts.
No, I don’t work on Sun’s legal team. I work in Sun’s
support organisation.
You say that
everybody is free to form opinions from whatever sources they have
And I certainly agree. What I do not agree with is the
habit that slashdotters and certain posters to these
osnews fora have gotten into of deliberate and wilful
refusal to believe anything that Sun actually says could
be the truth.
You can hold whatever opinion you want. What I care about
is that you do not misrepresent what the company I work
for has done.
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-03/sunflash.20030307.1.h…
includes this:
(begin quote)
Sun confirms that:
* As part of a series of licensing agreements, Sun acquired rights to make and ship derivative products based on the intellectual property in UNIX. This forms the foundation for the Solaris OS that ships today.
* Sun’s complete line of Solaris and Linux products — including Solaris for the SPARC and x86 platforms, Trusted Solaris[tm], the industry’s premier highly secure operating system, and Sun Linux — are covered by Sun’s portfolio of UNIX licensing agreements.
(end quote)
And back in 1991 Sun paid AT&T a large sum of cash to
ensure that Sun would have unfettered rights to whatever
subsequent code was developed in the Unix environment
by Sun.
“I pay more attention to the facts.”
You pay attention to the facts in the same way as the “moon landing was fake” people do. Could it simply sink a little bit into your mind that Sun had to buy code from SCO during their efforts for OpenSolaris/Solaris-x86 and that SCO’s newfound stupid business model is just a coincidence? Your argument is the same as saying that a grocery store with an SCO-based POS system who pays for a software update is driving SCO’s legal team to destroy Linux. The grocery store probably doesn’t even know Linux exists–they just wanted their update, darnit.
Companies have to do what they have to do, and if Sun’s lawyers say “you gotta buy it from SCO” then they gotta buy it from SCO. That’s the law.
Consider this, you are HP, you pay many millions for a sysV license, then some other sysV licensee turns around and open sources sysV. Suddenly, you sysV license is worth $0.00.
Sun has better lawyers.
No, I don’t work on Sun’s legal team. I work in Sun’s
support organisation.
—-
so you shouldnt be forming legal opinions either. sun’s pr releases have all not been very reliable before and they are free to change their mind. its not legably binding in any way
“What I care about
is that you do not misrepresent what the company I work
for has done.
”
its nothing personal. some people dont believe that sun has all the rights it claims. SCO, IBM, HP, novell and many others have different rights over the same code so its not very clear what kind of rights sun has. If sun has the rights and wants to do it the proof would be the product and the license that accompanies it. till then these kind of doubts will linger on fuelled by the likes of sco. you can do nothing about it so dont bother. just continue with the support and efforts you do to get a better product released
so you shouldnt be forming legal opinions either. sun’s pr releases have all not been very reliable before
Um, where was I forming a legal opinion? Which press
releases are you claiming have not been reliable? If
you have proof then you should contact Sun’s PR office
and point out the problems.
its nothing personal… you can do nothing about it so dont bother. just continue with the support and efforts you do to get a better product released
Well with the vitriol which people like you spout your
opinions about Sun it’s incredibly difficult to see the
“nothing personal” part.
I think your last sentence is a compliment — I’ll
take it as such for the moment.
It might not have occurred to you, but there is a problem
with making unsubstantiated claims about what rights Sun
has over Solaris. The claims which have been made publicly
by Sun staff who are authorised to make them about
Sun’s rights are factual claims, not vapour.
If you can hold off your impatience for just a little
longer you will see what Sun folk have been talking about
for months.
Um, where was I forming a legal opinion?
====
if what you said wasnt legal opinion then the claims made by people posting before me against sun werent legal opinions either. then why did you ask them if they were from the sun legal department. ?
”
Well with the vitriol which people like you spout your
opinions about Sun it’s incredibly difficult to see the
“nothing personal” part. ”
people like me? thats a gross overgeneralisation.
“It might not have occurred to you, but there is a problem
with making unsubstantiated claims about what rights Sun
has over Solaris”
correction. they were opinions and there is no need to be part of any legal term to form opinions. that was my simple point all along
“If you can hold off your impatience for just a little
longer you will see what Sun folk have been talking about
for months. ”
lets see. Sun people have been talking about this for say 5 years or so, not merely months and dont you call people impatient after such prolonged delays
stop doing PR and get the damn product and license out or dont ask people not to express their doubts, opinions and claims
there is NO way you or that head guy lying about proprietary and open source products are going to stop anybody