On Sat, Jul 25, 2015 at 12:00:02AM +0000, Roger Leigh wrote:
> On 24/07/2015 23:48, James Powell wrote:
> >CDE is a classic UNIX desktop, but it has long been since viable for
> >modern usages.
> >
> >Xfce, in truth, was a modern replacement for it using Xforms since Motif
> >was, at the time, under a different license. It bears the same classic
> >layout minus some differences.

Xfce used to resemble CDE, yes.
But it doesn't have a strong resemblence now.
Of the two, I prefer CDE.

> >However, last I had heard CDE was still unstable with some operations.
>
> My first thought on reading this was that sounds just like CDE used to be!
> (Being a CDE user back in the mid-late '90s.)

Heh. Sounds about right, given what I've read.
But there were several recent patches that fixed longstanding bugs, and
it's pretty reliable in my own experience.

> I used to really like CDE, and am very tempted to give it a try out sometime
> soon.

You'd probably want to build it from git, rather than the tarball.
Most of the commits are fixes, with a little bit of porting.
Refer to their wiki for (rather old) directions.
(http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/)
Some deviations:
- As of Jessie, motif is in main, thus the use of "non-free" is outdated.
- On 32-bit platforms only, you can use tirpc instead of glibc RPC;
this allows using rpcbind without the "-i" option.
On 64-bit systems, using tirpc breaks tooltalk.
- In Jessie, I stumbled across an issue with openbsd-inetd shortly after
switching to Devuan, so I'm not quite sure about how to report it:
the check for RPC support in the init script uses the wrong path.


I usually start it via the sysvinit script, though that isn't quite perfect.
(It probably doesn't do quite enough error checking, and I think the pgrep
invocation may be wrong. Also, I don't think it has a -pidfile option,
though I could add that without too much work...adding -quiet was trivial.)

HTH,
Isaac Dunham