
OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE - rhabarba
http://jamesdeagle.blogspot.com/2017/12/openbsd-62-cde.html
======
senko
Many years ago (around '96), a bunch of us used to spend way too much time at
the public terminals in university computing centre (SRCE) in Zagreb, Croatia.
They had about 10 compatible terminals (VT-220's and IBM-3151's) - and two Sun
Sparc workstations that were set up as graphical terminals using CDE.

We had to wait for an hour or two to have one of the text terminals free up
(damn MUD players hogged them up all the time, and we IRCers just wanted to
chat online!). Getting access to the graphical terminals was nigh impossible
unless you were there from the early morning or if you stayed through the
night (the place was open 24/7 if you can believe it).

Ah the wonders of graphical Unix! Multiple workplaces! I fondly remember the
doplhin wallpaper - my fave. And you could use Mosaic to browse the web
(Netscape was running pretty sluggish)! Nevermind one of the workstation had a
b/w monitor, it was still an amazing experience.

Fond memories.

~~~
Keyframe
They were VT320s with beautiful amber color! A few years prior to that I hang
out there as well. I remember a bunch of (older) students were taking precious
time on one of the Suns (Jagor) and all I wanted to do was to run rendering
algorithms I wrote in C on it (I was a highschool kid). So, I devised a
devious scheme. I wrote a C program that malloced memory like there's no
tomorrow. I figured out that SunOS didn't have a memory quota for users. What
happened then was that I got a PID for my program and waited patiently until
the whole OS crawled to a halt (usually fast enough it started trashing the
hard drives due to lack of memory). Students, out of frustration, would leave
the terminals one by one as their IRC sessions and whatnots would stop
working. It was a rule to never leave your terminal without logging out, so I
had a clean system. Once they all left for a break, I killed my PID, got back
the memory and resumed my snowflake rend.. er, work. Fun times!

~~~
j_s
Are there any hardware options connecting old monochrome screens (such as MDA
or Hercules) via modern technologies like USB?

~~~
qubex
Yes, there's a multitude of USB-to-RS/232 adapters and Linux can easily be
configured to echo a terminal to the serial port from boot onwards. Once
you've got a serial console you can do whatever you want.

Depending on the terminal, you'll need to fiddle with baud rates, parity, and
obviously hardware issues such as male/female connectors and number of pins.
It took me quite a while to get my VT100-compatible terminal talking to my
RaspberryPi3, but now it does, and it's great fun (particularly since I set up
SIMH and have an ancient period-appropriate version of Unix V emulated).

Brings me back to when Greybeards reigned the Earth (or rather the machine
room).

~~~
j_s
Thanks! I am looking to attach just an older monochrome monitor to a current-
day PC rather than a full-blown terminal. I was unable to find any obvious
solutions with a quick search.

I believe the constraints of the older technology may offer some advantages
like reducing eye strain, nostalgia (as you mentioned), and maybe even making
the interface obtuse enough to reduce my interest in staying online. Your
suggestion sounds doable today and would accomplish my intended goal.

~~~
qubex
I fully support using older (simpler) interfaces to avoid _distraction_ but I
am afraid I have to inform you that green phosphor screens are quite a strain
on the eyesight.

------
reirob
I completely skipped that CDE is GPL now [1]!? Wow! I want this to run on
Linux! Digging, deeper, it apparently is already working on Ubuntu [2].

[1] from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment):

"After a long history as proprietary software, CDE was released as free
software on 6 August 2012, under the GNU Lesser General Public License,
version 2 or later.[3] Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported
to Linux and BSD derivatives."

[2]
[https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatform...](https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatforms/)

------
krylon
During my training I had the opportunity to work at a Sun workstation running
Solaris and CDE. I did not find it to be a very comfortable working
environment, but I _loved_ the look. Even though I am too young to have been
around when CDE was _the_ desktop for Unix systems, I was infected with
instant nostalgia.

I have been trying to build CDE myself a few times, but it always failed, and
I never bothered to investigate. But I think I know what I will be doing over
Christmas on my ancient OpenBSD laptop. ;-)

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reacharavindh
Had never heard of CDE before. I guess this is what my nephew feels when he
sees a floppy disk and connects it to the save icon on PCs :-)

As an aside, it would be a treat to have a GUI environment that is started
from scratch with the Unix philosophy at core. GNOME is not it, for it is so
heavily packaged with stuff I don't need, and is slow and heavy.

~~~
rhabarba
I doubt that "the Unix philosophy" \- do one thing well - is applicable to the
increasingly more complicated world of GUIs, except the basic window managers
like cwm.

~~~
swiley
Most things really don't need a GUI unless you're actually viewing or
manipulating graphical data.

Even then it's often nicer to have a text format that describes it.

~~~
digi_owl
For some reason find myself reaching for TUIs again and again. Especially ones
that mimic the Borland behavior.

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danaliv
What a treat! OpenBSD was my daily driver years and years ago—version
2.something I think?—and I set up my desktop environment to mimic CDE as much
as I could. It was obviously a pale imitation, but I totally get the
“gravitational pull” the author mentions. Sounds like I have something fun to
do while my partner is visiting family!

------
awiesenhofer
As someone who only knows these interfaces from movies (i think "Eraser" with
Arnold Schwarzenegger had a terminal like this), what were the main advantages
of CDE compared to other DEs at the time? Or to WfW/Windows9x/OS2/System7?

~~~
reirob
From the article [1] linked in the post:

"CDE has achieved something that no other desktop environment has ever given
me: a complete and total dedication to expected behaviour - or, put
differently, a complete absence of unexpected behaviour."

"Another important aspect of CDE is the magical word "consistency". CDE is
highly consistent (as long as you avoid the slow Java-based applications Sun
ships with Solaris 9); it uses only only one theme with only a few colours
(grey, greyer, and 'Solaris purple'), and buttons are re-used in different
places only there where they do exactly the same thing. The dash and dot
buttons on the dock do exactly the same thing to the dock as they do to
windows (yes, you can actually iconify the dock). This consistency also stems
from the fact that CDE is so spartan: it has few GUI elements that could
actually be inconsistent."

I think when CDE would have been open-source, there might not have been KDE or
Gnome (which was developped, because of QT's license at the time of the KDE
inception. At this time there was a need to have a desktop environment for
Linux - and the existing Unix desktop environment, CDE was proprietary.

[1]
[http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/](http://www.osnews.com/story/18969/pt_VII_CDE/page2/)

~~~
Asooka
It sadly does feel like the pursuit of ideological/political purity, while
admirable and good, has left us in a place with no practical ways forward
towards actually converging into a single "best" system.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
At least in Linux's case, there isn't really much desire to converge into a
single "best" system. Partly because "best" is somewhat subjective, but also
because the kind of person who cares enough about open source to put that kind
of effort into it is already pretty far on one side of the
ideology/practicality divide. And that's before the parties interested in
monetization get involved.

------
rbanffy
I think the decision to host the source on Sourceforge is the most humorous
touch...

------
mhd
One nice thing I liked about Motif desktops back in the days was that
different applications were easily "themable" to have a different base
background, which made differentiating windows very easy.

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INTPenis
I honestly don't see why anyone would want to use this DE today.

Rewind 15 years and I had a laptop with 256M RAM and would use a very bare
bones tiling window manager to keep resource use down.

But today my Linux system is much more close to a replacement of a Windows or
Mac OS system. I'm quite happy with the resources available and the advances
made in Gnome/KDE.

I would never go back to using bare bones DE's or OpenMotif.

~~~
rhabarba
Why wouldn't you still want to keep resource use down?

~~~
INTPenis
I don't need to. I haven't had a need to save resources for over 5 years. I
can't remember exactly when that need went away but likely it was earlier than
5 years ago.

I'm just measuring the time I've had Lenovo Thinkpads which is at least 5
years.

And those two thinkpads have been running Fedora with a full Gnome 3 suite
without issue.

In the beginning I even had local VMs but now I use my home lab for that.

~~~
segmondy
This line of thinking is why we have ridiculous bloat. I use to run servers
that will have 50+ simultaneous users and these servers will have 256mb of
ram. Today 256mb of ram is probably not enough for most simple apps. As a
matter of fact, I was shopping for 128gb-256gb ram server yesternight. :-(

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discreteevent
I used to like using CDE on Solaris. There was something very quiet about the
ui. I mainly used it for running x-terms though. The only gui app I used
frequently was Nedit (still my favourite text editor of all time - light, fast
and good looking!)

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youdontknowtho
OpenVMS shipped with CDE for a long time. I wonder if it still does?

~~~
rhabarba
Wasn't that DECwindows?

~~~
Jaruzel
DECWindows was a variant of CDE I believe. I spent the first few years of my
career as a sysadmin for a large VAX-Cluster and had daily access to some
DECStations running it.

~~~
youdontknowtho
Nice. I never had a DECstation. I started on Alpha clusters. They were cool.
I'm kind of excited about the x64 port. The hobby license will hopefully still
exist and I can setup some VM's.

------
busterarm
I've got a brand new X270 coming that's getting OpenBSD, and while I'm a 99%
terminal guy, I can't wait to install this for the occasional times I need a
DE.

------
digi_owl
Didn't XFCE start out as an attempt at emulating this UI?

~~~
rhabarba
Yes, but they sadly diverged towards GNOME rather soon.

~~~
Paianni
Huh? Apart from Gtk+, what does Xfce have to do with GNOME?

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lholden
Some of my first professional web development work back in the late 90s was
writing perl using emacs on a CDE desktop.

(I don't remember exactly _why_ we were using this setup, but locally I was
running Linux, but was running a X session from a shared Solaris box.)

------
72deluxe
Lovely to see this. I used CDE when I was on work experience at Rover and they
had a tonne of Sun pizza boxes connecting to their SunOS mainframes.

I remember using early KDE (KDE 2) with a CDE colour scheme to emulate the
look.

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jlebrech
and we make uis in html that look worse than this.

~~~
rhabarba
And infect your machine.

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z3t4
Doesn't look very sexy

~~~
swiley
I personally think motif/lesstif is _way_ sexier than most of the default GTK
themes.

~~~
digi_owl
Reminds me that i should really sit down and bang out a FVWM config i can be
comfortable with.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FVWM)

~~~
swiley
YES! I've been running FVWM since I was a kid! I want to switch to vtwm though
because it cross compiles more nicely.

