OpenWindows is a discontinued

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

s which combined a display server supporting the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

protocol, the XView and

OLIT OLIT (OPEN LOOK Intrinsics Toolkit ) is a widget toolkit from Sun Microsystems introduced in 1988, providing an OPEN LOOK user interface for X Window System applications. It provides an X Toolkit Intrinsics, Xt application programming interface f ...

toolkits, the OPEN LOOK Window Manager ( olwm), and the

DeskSet SunView (Sun Visual/Integrated Environment for Workstations) is a discontinued user interface toolkit and windowing system from Sun Microsystems, launched in 1985, and included as part of its Unix implementation, starting with SunOS Release 3.0 ...

productivity tools; earlier versions of OpenWindows also supported the

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

protocol. It implements the OPEN LOOK GUI specification. OpenWindows was included in later releases of the

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems from 1982 until the mid-1990s. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based ...

4 and Solaris

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, until its removal in Solaris 9 in favor of

Common Desktop Environment The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif (software), Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98, UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop a ...

(CDE) and

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

2.0.

History

OpenWindows 1.0 was released in 1989 as a separately licensed addition to

4.0, replacing the older SunView (originally "SunTools") windowing system. Its core is the "xnews server", a hybrid window server that as its name implies supports both X11 and

-based applications. The server can also display legacy SunView applications, although this functionality was not well-supported. (A standalone NeWS windowing system was also available for a time, but was never the primary SunOS windowing environment.) Starting with SunOS 4.1.1 in 1990, OpenWindows 2.0 was bundled with the operating system. Solaris 2.0, the first release of the successor to SunOS 4, included OpenWindows 3.0.1. Starting with Solaris 2.3 in late 1993, Sun switched to a standard X11R5 release of X11. It was still called OpenWindows (now version 3.3), but the NeWS protocol was replaced by support for Display PostScript. Support for SunView applications was removed. The graphical look and feel of the window manager and tools is still based on OPEN LOOK. Solaris 7 featured OpenWindows 3.6.1, with an X11R6.4 server. In 1993, Sun and the other major Unix vendors of the time formed the COSE alliance, seeking further standardization among their Unix releases. The alliance chose the Motif look and feel as its standard, and Sun announced it would phase out OpenWindows in favor of the new COSE desktop environment, which came to be known as CDE. The last release of OpenWindows is version 3.6.2, included in Solaris 8. With the release of Solaris 9 in 2002, the removal of OpenWindows support from Solaris finally began, as the OPEN LOOK DeskSet tools, OLIT and XView development tools, and olwm were removed. Support for running and displaying applications built with XView or OLIT remains in both Solaris 9 and Solaris 10, but the necessary libraries are no longer included in Solaris 11 and later releases.

Open source development

A project called "OWAcomp", the "OpenWindows Augmented Compatibility Environment", aims to make it possible to use the OpenWindows Deskset environment on Solaris 9, 10 (Sparc and x86) and Linux (x86). There is also a project hosted at SourceForge.net called "openlook" that is based on OpenWindows. As of July 2007, it is quite

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-centric. Some OpenWindows applications were never released as open source by Sun, so some of these have been rewritten and some are still missing.

References

#
OpenWindows 1.0 announcement
# tp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/Solaris2/FAQ Solaris FAQ

External links

* * {{Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems software Desktop environments 1989 software

History

Open source development

See also

References

External links