CDE released as open source


Recommended Posts

  Quote

We have some very good news for those of us with a love for the Common Desktop Environment. I'm a huge fan of CDE - I've even dedicated an article to it --- so I'm excited about this. CDE has been released as open source under the LGPL, and can be downloaded as of today for Debian and Ubuntu. Motif will follow later.

What is the Common Desktop Environment? From my earlier article on CDE:

  Quote
CDE was announced in 1993, as a joint development effort by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell, and Sun. CDE was part of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE), an effort by the major UNIX vendors of the time to counter the UNIX wars which were basically holding UNIX hostage. The big UNIX guys realised that Microsoft was making strong inroads into the traditional UNIX space (workstations and data centers), and that something needed to be done to make sure that UNIX would be able to stand the major competition they were about to face.

COSE had several areas of focus, such as networking, graphics, multimedia, object technology, and many other things; they wanted to ensure interoperability between the various UNIX offerings in the world.

Sadly, CDE was closed source, and as such, never gained much traction beyond big-iron UNIX systems like Solaris and HP-UX. The open source world focussed on KDE and GNOME instead, and while Xfce was inspired by CDE in its early days, it started carving out its own path later on.

So, yes, it might be too late, but that doesn't mean it's any less cool and awesome. "The Common Desktop Environment project is proud to announce the open sourcing of the Common Desktop Environment a.k.a. CDE," the project writes, "CDE was long the defacto standard among workstation vendors which enabled ease of software porting and training. It is still in use by Solaris (up to version 10), HP-UX, AIX and OpenVMS."

Motif, the widget toolkit used by CDE, will also be released as open source, but since there are still a few legal issues to work out there, this will have to wait. In the meantime, the project decided to move ahead with CDE, since it can be built using Open Motif anyway. (...)

Source: OSNews

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1096359-cde-released-as-open-source/
Share on other sites

For those of you who have never used or seen CDE, it's this beauty:

CDE-8.png

I'm going to install it in a Debian 6.0 VM later. For old times' sake - I used to use CDE on IBM RS/6000 workstations at the university. Back in the 1990s.

I know I'll be hated for say this but I'd love for CDE to emerge as the default desktop on *NIX to replace all the widget kits and desktops out there.

FreeBSD + CDE + Modernised Xorg + Modernised CDE (Anti-alised fonts, system configuration tools etc) and voila it would be an awesome alternative to those who crave something different.

  Mr Nom Nom said:
FreeBSD + CDE + Modernised Xorg + Modernised CDE (Anti-alised fonts, system configuration tools etc) and voila it would be an awesome alternative to those who crave something different.

FreeBSD, eh?

  Quote
Hi, I am the documentation lead for the CDE project.

The people behind OpenCDE are involved with CDE as well. A FreeBSD port is in progress.

There is an issue with dthello that is making it impossible for it to run on other distributions other than Debain Squeeze and Ubuntu. It's related to rpcbind and it's being worked on.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • It's not about the amount of work. How can you not know that? Game companies charge what the market will bear, not based on what it cost to make. The market will clearly bear any price for a Mario series game because of the huge number fans across many decades. I don't expect Outer Worlds 2 to support that price point with matching huge sales numbers. I guess we'll know soon enough at release.
    • Windows 10 KB5060534, KB5060532, KB5060530, KB5060529 recovery updates released by Sayan Sen Microsoft this week released Patch Tuesday updates for the month of June 2025 on Windows 10 (KB5060533 / KB5060531 / KB5061010 / KB5060998) and Windows 11 (KB5060842, KB5060999). Alongside that dynamic updates for Windows 10 were also published. This time there were no such updates for Windows 11 which is quite rare. Dynamic updates bring improvements to the Windows Recovery in the form of Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) updates, also called Safe OS updates, as well as to the Setup binaries in the form of Setup updates. These Dynamic Update packages are meant to be applied to existing Windows images prior to their deployment. These packages include fixes to Setup.exe binaries, SafeOS updates for Windows Recovery Environment, and more. Dynamic Updates also help preserve Language Pack (LP) and Features on Demand (FODs) content during the upgrade process. VBScript, for example, is currently an FOD on Windows 11 24H2. Only recovery updates were released. The changelogs are given below: KB5060534: Safe OS Dynamic Update for Windows 10: June 10, 2025 KB5060532: Safe OS Dynamic Update for Windows 10, version 21H2 and 22H2: June 10, 2025 KB5060530: Safe OS Dynamic Update for Windows 10, version 1809 and Windows Server 2019: June 10, 2025 KB5060529: Safe OS Dynamic Update for Windows 10, version 1607 and Windows Server 2016: June 10, 2025 Microsoft notes that the updates will be downloaded and installed automatically via the Windows Update channel. You can also avail them manually on Microsoft's Update Catalog website: KB5060534, KB5060532, KB5060530, and KB5060534.
    • Hello, I didn't see any replacements listed at https://lian-li.com/product-category/accessories/, but they do have a contact page at https://lian-li.com/contact-us/.  I suspect reaching out to them would produce further information about the availability of a replacement.  Regards, Aryeh Goretsky  
    • I used to always use the WPD app, but I dont really trust it anymore since it hasnt had updates in a long time. Funny thing is, I recently came across a tool literally called 'Crapfixer' and it looks exactly like CrapCleaner 😅 You should check it out, its on GitHub  
  • Recent Achievements

    • Apprentice
      Wireless wookie went up a rank
      Apprentice
    • Week One Done
      bukro earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      Wulle earned a badge
      One Year In
    • One Month Later
      Wulle earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Month Later
      Simmo3D earned a badge
      One Month Later
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      555
    2. 2
      ATLien_0
      254
    3. 3
      +FloatingFatMan
      177
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      123
    5. 5
      Steven P.
      96
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!