Wish list item for discussion

[Dave Gudewicz]

While learning Debian Linux lately, I've come to like the X based display managers and desktop environments, namely GNOME and KDE.

How about a port of these Open Source items to OpenVMS?

Btw, I don't usually use Open when refering to VMS, but it makes sense in the previous sentence.

Not implying that CDE be replaced, but rather have the option to use GNOME / KDE if desired.

[ShyGuy]

Given that VMS engineering seems to only have a finit amount of "resources" available to do all the work that we would all like to see done - I guess it depends on what we the users think is the most urgently needed feature.

While I agree that Gnome or KDE would be nice, I think that there are features with a higher priority.

/Shyguy

[John Eerenberg]

VMS does X-windows and has for years. I'm not sure what you are asking. Do you want to access VMS via X-windows? (I don't know much about linux, but my experience has been it's easy to setup).

[Stephen Hoffman]

Gnome and KDE are X interfaces that are in common use in Linux and other environments, and can be thought of as newer replacements and extensions for the Motif, CDE, and XUI interfaces for X Windows.

Various folks here in OpenVMS Engineering are aware of these (I'm running RedHat on one of the local IA-32 boxes), and we too would like to have updated Motif and updated X libraries -- DECwindows V1.3 is the first software update made to DECwindows in a while -- and I and others would certainly like to see KDE and Gnome and the supporting tools (Qt, etc) made available in addition to the new DECwindows V1.3 work.

That said, the engineers here in OpenVMS Engineering are all a little busy with new Alpha systems and with the OpenVMS port to Intel Itanium. (Now if y'all will excuse me, I have some new file system code to write.)

[Dave Gudewicz]

Thanks for the reply Hoff. I'm sure you have many other higher priority items to deal with.

What I was trying to do was plant the seed. Turns out I didn't have to.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Dave,

for KDE you will need Qt. Some work in that direction has
been done (http://www.lehrig.de)
but first you would need to bring that up to date and then get started with KDE itself.

Greetings, Martin

(Gnome sits on top of GTK, so there you already could use stuff done as part of the Mozilla port)