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CDE Unix desktop open sourced

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 10 comments
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The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix's commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.

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Comments (10)

caitlyn ·
I always liked CDE. By today's standards it's resource utilization will be tiny. I'm going to see if I can make it work on a modern distro. It's worth a try :)

Some of you may remember that XFCE started out as a free CDE look-alike based on XForms.
number6x ·
I think S.u.S.E. 6.2 was the last time I used CDE.

My then employer had either Linux or Solaris workstations. All had CDE. CDE was standard on Solaris at the time, until they switched to gnome sometime after 2000. They had to buy licenses for Linux, but got some sort of site license.

It was a nice desktop.
caitlyn ·
I still remember Triteal selling CDE for Red Hat 4.0. That's the original Red Hat, the precursor of Fedora, before there was an enterprise produce, back around 1996-97.
JaseP ·
Well, nice to see it GPL'd,... or LGPL'd,... That means parts of it can be cannibalised into other DE's... Or the other way around... But one commenter noted "19 years too late." Very true...
gus3 ·
I'm with number6x. I've liked Mwm ever since I was exposed to its derivative UI, GeoWorks Ensemble. When I found CDE in Solaris 9, I fell in love with it, and would have studied it more and used it more if I'd had my own Sparc system.

I'm looking forward to the patchset to get it to build on Lesstif.
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:But one commenter noted "19 years too late.


You guys are having a severe case of nostalgia, that is all. :-)

Yes, it is many years too late.

caitlyn ·
Quoting:You guys are having a severe case of nostalgia, that is all. :-)
Maybe, maybe not. For those of us who prefer a lightweight, rather minimal desktop to begin with this may actually be worth a look. There is also OpenCDE, which is a separate project.
CFWhitman ·
They'll have to blow a lot of dust off. I'm not sure if anyone's willing to put in the effort to make CDE really viable again. It could happen though.
Bob_Robertson ·
olwm and olvwm are still packaged in Debian.
caitlyn ·
There was another article talking about merging CDE and openCDE and working together on new features. It's going to be interesting to see how well the developers can revive this.

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