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Network Operating Systems-I

notes

Note Trace Center is acting as the coordinator and secretariat for DACX, as well
as assisting in implementation of access strategies in software development and testing.
The Trace Center maintains an electronic mail account at the University to allow DACX
members to communicate issues quickly.

the Downside

The downside of x-windows is that it requires a lot of bandwidth to operate. You can get it to
work over a 14.4 baud modem, but it is slow. Even over Ethernet graphic intensive clients can be
sluggish. Also, more than one flavor of x-windows emerged so that the main benefit is somewhat
negated. Motif is one of the main flavors of x-windows, but others exist.
enter kDe and gnome

X has become the de facto window system in free software.
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich. At the time, he was troubled by the inconsistencies
in UNIX applications. He proposed a new desktop environment. He also wanted to make this
desktop easy to use. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest.
Matthias chose to use the Qt toolkit for the KDE project. At the time, Qt did not use a free
software licence. Members of the GNU project became concerned with the use of such a toolkit
for building a free software desktop environment. In August 1997, two projects were started
in response to KDE: the Harmony toolkit (a free replacement for the Qt libraries) and GNOME
(a different desktop without Qt and built entirely on top of free software). GTK+ was chosen as
the base of GNOME in place of the Qt toolkit.
In November 1998, the Qt toolkit was licensed under the free/open source Q Public License
(QPL). But debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL). In
September 2000, Trolltech made the UNIX version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in
addition to the QPL, which has eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation.
Both KDE and GNOME now participate in freedesktop.org, an effort to standardize UNIX
desktop interoperability, although there is still some competition between them.
KDE and Gnome are complete desktop environments that consist of a large number of tightly
integrated yet still separate pieces of software. Gnome uses a window manager called metacity,
KDE uses kwin. Both these desktops can be used with any other window manager if you do not
like the default choice.
Linux is like Lego. You can build your own desktop environment. Both KDE and Gnome are
just big packages with software aimed to look and feel the same way, work well together and
generally give you a nice experience. If you dislike a component, then replace it with something
else. It’s that simple.
Application that are “made for gnome” or “made for kde” can be used with any desktop. This
only means that that the program use a set of library functions found in their underlying gnome-
libs or kdelibs. You do not need to use the actual desktops to use the applications, software made
for KDE and Gnome can be used with any window manager / desktop as long as you got the
proper libraries installed. There is no reason to use only applications made for the desktop you
prefer, the “best software” for one task is made for KDE, the best for another task is made for
Gnome. Use the best from both worlds.

32 LoveLy professionaL university