OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD 6.2 and CDE

jamesdeagle.blogspot.com

130 pointsrhabarba58 comments

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.

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!

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

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).

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.

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.

denial-of-service attack

Similar experience with Aix and DG/UX terminals.

Those pesky fellow students using a 21'' monitor to be able to run 4 simultaneous xterms running a mix of MUD and talk sessions, whereas we wanted to make use of the X graphics capabilities. :)

Where those terminals open to the general public, i.e. people with no affiliation to the university?

The centre provided various networking-related services for all the universities in croatia, and by extension the high school network as well (these are somewhat linked in Croatia).

So anyone having any connection to any university or highschool in croatia could get an account on a public server (there was just one opened to the general public and had a dozen thousand users or so) and access the termiinals.

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:

"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...

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. ;-)

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.

The Unix philosophy GUI thing has been done in a few directions.

Plan9 did "absolutely everything is a data stream". Connect anything to anything in a bitmapped desktop.

BeOS/haiku did "everything is an icon". Applications are not monoliths. Rather, they are organic on top of the GUI and filesystem.

Tiling windows managers steer towards a usage of multiplexing terminals (and needing little else).

Openbox is a good option for Linux. It's a floating window manager that has minimal build requirements and is configured via text files, though GUI configuration tools exist for those so inclined. Its menu system supports pipe menus, and you can make it look like nearly anything you want.

The Lumina desktop is another contender; it's a project by the TrueOS/PC-BSD folks and it's coming along nicely. It also has minimal requirements and while it's made for BSD it also works well on Linux.

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.

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.

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

You can always use a window manager and some xterms. It is what I have been using for 20 years.

cde is kde's uncle

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!

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?

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/

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.

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.

There were no major Unix DEs at the time IIRC. The CDE was the first joint approach to create one that actually ran everywhere.

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

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.

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.

Keep in mind that CDE is not exactly bare bones desktop environment (although in comparison to KDE/Gnoome it is not especially resource hungry). When compared to things like LXDE or Xfce which really are window managers bundled with few applications CDE is real integrated desktop environment with object model, probably only two other portable unix desktop environments are KDE and Gnome.

Also, 15 years ago 256MB RAM in laptop was on the high-end side of things and 128MB was completely sufficient to run KDE/Gnome with Mozilla, Evolution and what not.

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

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.

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. :-(

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!)

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

Wasn't that DECwindows?

DECwindows is (at least in the later versions) built on top of CDE.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes, but they sadly diverged towards GNOME rather soon.

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

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.)

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.

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

And infect your machine.

Doesn't look very sexy

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

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

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

A lot of people preferred the more rounded 3D look of SGI's Motif hack and 4DWM.

I actually liked OpenLook/XView best, apart from that weird scrollbar.

Looked up XView, and the example on Wikipedia reminds me a whole lot of the current flat/paper thing going on with Mobile UIs.

Software from the 80's tends not to.

That's not from the 80's but the 90's.

Motif is from 1989.

utilitarian, also has the dynamic widgets just as inbox and calendar icon.

Retro cool is always sexy.

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