Other Openlook, CDE, Motif, etc

[decuser]

I'm curious what the state of the ancient openlook, cde, motif, others old gui's are on FreeBSD? Do y'all know of any sites that play around with the old school guis on freebsd?

 

[Alain De Vos]

The first question is for which window manager.

 

[covacat]

not on freebsd but..

Build your own SPARC workstation with QEMU and Solaris

Sun produced high-performance Unix workstations in the late 80s through the 2000s. They were powerful and expensive, out of reach for most mere mortals. Let's build our own and see what it was like to use! We're going to use QEMU to emulate a SPARC machine, the architecture that most Sun systems...

learn.adafruit.com

 

[mer]

CDE. That brings back memories, and actually pretty good ones. CDE was commercial, perhaps Oracle has rights/ownership at the moment.
There may be other look/work alikes or there may actually be projects based on Sun CDDL code.
I'd start off googling common desktop environment or CDE

 

[dbdemon]

I've watched a couple of videos on this topic recently:

Spoiler: Robonuggie: eMWM

View: https://youtu.be/RiGDdARNtBg

Spoiler: SUN Ultra 24 - FreeBSD 13 and CDE

View: https://youtu.be/xOPRHi4tjRQ

 

[Alain De Vos]

I use a poor-mans CDE with wayland.
That is :
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME="qt5ct" & choose with <qt5ct> "appearance cde".
With lxappearance i set "widget ThinIce"

 

[cy@]

Motif and CDE are maintained in ports. I'm working on a cde-devel port as well, still need to get pkg-plist right before committing it.

Openlook was removed because it didn't support 64-bit, it segfaulted on 64-bit FreeBSD. I recall seeing some 64-bit patches for openlook about ten or more years ago but I can't find them anymore. If I can find, or someone sends me, the 64-bit patches I'm certainly willing to bring it back. To create new 64-bit patches from scratch would be a multi-month project. I still have the distfiles and the ports (locally) if anyone is willing to put the work to port it to 64-bit.

Openlook only ran on 32-bit Sparc. Sun shipped CDE with Solaris when Sparc64 was produced. Later on, as of Solaris 10, Sun dropped support for CDE, shipping Gnome2 with Solaris. Openlook and XView were never written to run on 64-bit platforms.