[SunRescue] CDE ramblings (was: Solaris on older Sparc boxes)

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2000 ward at zilla.nu wrote:

> Thank God they finally fixed most of the problems in VUE.  It was a huge
> resource hog (not like CDE isn't), and it liked to behave very strangely.  I
> miss the 712/60 I used to use; then again, I've always been a sucker for NeXT-
> related hardware.  Steve Jobs just can't seem to keep from getting angry and/or
> bored, thus screwing everything up for everyone else.  The 712 was an excellent
> successor to the NeXTStation; NeXT may not have ever used it, but HP sure made a
> nice bundle of money off of it, and even used a lot of the design in their
> future workstation lines.

The 712 was a neat box.  Had a lot built in, but expandability was
practically nonexistent.  A good parallel is the SGI Indy.

One nice thing about the 712 is that it's one of the few older systems
supported under HPUX 11.0.  The 735's can be coaxed to run but are a
little squirrelly.

And, of course, the 712 has the neat SparcStation pizzabox formfactor,
making it easy to stack with a bunch of SS10's and 20's.  :)

> Didn't CDE come out of IBM, DEC, Sun, and HP all bringing something to the table
> to produce a common desktop with the OSF?  Seems to me that it's almost
> entirely VUE, with a few minor additions.  Maybe IBM threw in the rights to some

It was mostly the OSF federation.  Sun was a latecomer and brought very
little (dtmail is the majority of it).

> Is the CDE code the same across platforms?  Not at all.  Is the feel the same 
> across platforms?  Almost, but not quite.  Is it really a common desktop?  I 
> guess.  I always liked the version that Triteal put out until Redhat put a stop
> to it.  The virtual desktop display was neat in that it showed a miniature of 
> the desktop, not unlike the fvwm pager.  In my opinion, it worked better under 
> HP-UX 9.07 than 10.20's CDE does; or at least it sure felt faster on a 735.

The handling of multiple workspaces is the biggest drawback of CDE as far
as I am concerned.  An olvwm/fvwm-like pager along with the ability to
drag windows from one workspace to another would be a godsend.

-James