CDE – Common Desktop Environment

Last Updated on: 20th September 2023, 12:24 am

There is a new desktop available for Sparkers now: CDE.

From Wikipedia:

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX98 Workstation Product Standard, and was long the “classic” Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations.

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. Since its release as free software, CDE has been ported to Linux and BSD derivatives.

CDE is offered from the project page as a source package to be downloaded, compiled and installed on your own. The latest version 2.2.4 was released in June 2016.

Binary files of CDE are available in Sparky repository. Source packages (dsc, orig) are not available, due to problems with building.

Installation

1. APT:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cde-desktop

2. APTus:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sparky-aptus sparky-desktop

Then install CDE via APTus from the Menu-> System-> APTus-> Desktop-> CDE

3. Fresh system installation via Sparky MinimalGUI/MinimalCLI 4.4 iso image (and Sparky Advanced Installer).

I recommend the Common Desktop Environment for didactic and learning purpose only.
Its archaic design does not resemble today’s desktops, but it’s my private opinion only.