Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 02:41:44 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: jkh@zippy.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: scrappy@hub.org, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: From Slashdot... Message-ID: <199902010241.TAA17102@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <79876.917829229@zippy.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 31, 99 04:33:49 pm
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> Everyone talks about how nice desktop support would be but nobody DOES > anything and, as a result, every initiative to support the desktop > more seriously in FreeBSD has been a dead loss. The desktop contest > went down without so much as a single decent entry, XiG sold about 3 > copies of CDE for FreeBSD when they made a play for the (non-existent) > FreeBSD desktop market (and don't tell me this was just anti-CDE > attitudes in action since they sold thousands of copies for Linux) and > the attempt to bring 3DFX support to FreeBSD has been so long in > coming that I'm no longer even waiting for it, etc. The people I'm aware of who use FreeBSD as a serious desktop are using KDE. It complies with open standards, and has the disctinct advantages over CDE both of not costing anything, and of being a full CORBA-based implementation, by those rare birds in the free software community, Professionals Who Know What The Hell They Are Doing And Know How To Do It Quickly And Well(tm). CDE is very much a dead end; the only useful pieces that came out of CDE are the freely usable parts: the specifications and the style guides. I think the desktop contest went down so badly because it was a phenomenally uninteresting thing to hack on. I personnaly didn't get involved because of the politics of layered software in FreeBSD; it's basically impossible to get FreeBSD to incorporate the technology needed to layer software; for a desktop, this is a System V style rc structure. It's just not worthwhile working on something that's supposedly layered, but would require the install from hell to get working if the powers-that-be didn't incorporate support for it in the monolithic system startup and config files. It isn't really worth it to me unless the reboot after the install results in a graphical login. You might want to rehold the contest, if you can promise that the winner's code will go on the CDROM as something other than a port, and that the components necessary to easily make it the default view of the system were included in the system startup files as a switch that can be flipped. If not, you probably don't want to rehold it, since you'll get the same lukewarm response the first contest got. The first thing that has to happen is from the URL that started this thread: * xBSD support. All the userspace GGI code is designed to be portable and should run quite well on xBSD, but AFAIK KGI drivers cannot be currently run on xBSD. There are no license issues as KGI and its drivers are not GPLed, so that is not the problem. Rather, xBSD does not have the fbdev driver system and the next release of KGI is not done yet. If these problems can be fixed (not by me), all of this should work on xBSD as well. FreeBSD has to be willing to integrate code that's not that interesting to the core/committers who, probably because others migrated away, are predominantly server weenies, not desktop weenies. Anyway, that's my take on it. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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