Before I try going to far down the path of building JDS, I'm going to
try taking a look at the blastwave binaries. I'm working in a closed
environment that makes it problematic when it comes to downloading and
building signficant amounts of software.

The application issues you cite aren't an impact - I'm really only in
this to gain  the basic functionality. The window mgr (metacity), GNOME
panel, and GTK+.

There are two reasons that I'm exploring this option:
1) We're doing a significant amount of GTK+ software development and
we've been stuck with the version that comes with Solaris 9. Since Sun
hasn't shown an inclination to upgrade to newer versions, we've been
stuck with a growing number of bugs in that version. We tried working
with Sun on one of them and didn't have much success - it was easier to
dig up the Gnome source code, get a handle on what was going on, and
then change our code to work around the problem.
2) We'd like to use Gnome as the operational desktop - but locking it
down and restricting operator capability is problematic. The real kicker
is the inability to prevent the operator from messing around with the
Gnome panel contents. All issues that have been addressed in later
versions of Gnome.

Thanks for all the input so far.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian.Cameron at Sun.COM [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 12:58 PM
To: Matt Keenan
Cc: Pierce, Gregory M; desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
Subject: Re: [desktop-discuss] JDS on Solaris 9?


Greg/Matt:

Actually if you tried to build GNOME on Solaris 9/10, you probably would
find it would mostly work.  You would probably run into some issues
where the code and/or spec files would need some tweaking.

You would also probably find that most a11y functionality would not work
properly since it depends on various X-extensions that are probably not
available on Solaris 9.  But if you don't find a11y important, then this
may not bother you.  Note that GNOME does depend pretty heavily on the
XRender extension.  I'm not sure if that is on Solaris 9 - if not you
may have problems.

Also, some functionality probably wouldn't work so well.  Some programs
depend on HAL (and therefore don't even work in Nevada yet) such as the
CD player, CD ripper, CD burning support in Nautilus, and support for
USB/firewire/camera media.  Programs such as the CD player could
probably be hacked to work on Solaris 9 if anyone had the interest - or
people could probably get by using the older versions of programs like
the CD player.

You may also find that you need to build newer versions of various GNU
components that aren't really a part of the GNOME stack (such as
libexpat, libxml, libxslt, etc.).

I'm sure that we'd accept patches and modifications to the spec files
needed for building on Solaris 9 if they were written with proper
#ifdefs so that the patches needed for Solaris 9 were not applied to
Nevada.  For that matter, the GNOME community would likely also accept
well written patches needed for Solaris 9/10 support.

If you have an interest in doing this, I'd certainly be happy to help
you analyze and work around any build issues you run into.

Brian

>> Anyone attempted a build of JDS on Solaris 9?
>>
>> I'm stuck in an environment that cannot upgrade to Solaris 10 (let 
>> alone Nevada), but am running into limitations with Gnome 2.0.2/GTK
2.0.
>>
>> Before wasting a ton of time/effort on building it, is using Solaris 
>> 9 pretty much a deal-breaker?
>>   
> 
> For JDS 4 (Vermillion/Gnome 2.14) don't bother, unless you want to 
> spend a huge amount of time back porting a load of required 
> liobraries..... JDS 4 won't even build on S10...
> 
> JDS 3 however gnome 2.6 may build on S9, I don't know the exact 
> dependencies someone may be able to comment on that...
> 
> 
> Matt
> 
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