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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. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...
workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or 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 systems. The term ''worksta ...
s which combined
SunView SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations, originally SunTools) is a discontinued windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later U ...
, NeWS, and
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 provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting ...
protocols. 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. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 ...
4 and Solaris
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
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 widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercia ...
(CDE) and GNOME 2.0. OpenWindows implements the OPEN LOOK GUI specification. OpenWindows is made of four components: the OPEN LOOK Window Manager ( olwm), the DeskSet productivity tools, the XView and OLIT widget toolkits, and the underlying X11/NeWS window server.


History

OpenWindows 1.0 was released in 1989 as a separately licensed addition to
SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 ...
4.0, replacing the older
SunView SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations, originally SunTools) is a discontinued windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later U ...
(originally "SunTools")
windowing system In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...
. Its core is the "xnews server", a hybrid window server that as its name implies supports both X11 and NeWS-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 Display PostScript (or DPS) is a 2D graphics engine system for computers which uses the PostScript (PS) imaging model and language (originally developed for computer printing) to generate on-screen graphics. To the basic PS system, DPS adds a num ...
. 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 Motif may refer to: General concepts * Motif (chess composition), an element of a move in the consideration of its purpose * Motif (folkloristics), a recurring element that creates recognizable patterns in folklore and folk-art traditions * Moti ...
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 CDE may refer to: Education * California Department of Education * Career Development Event, a type of contest sponsored by the National FFA Organization * Center for Data Engineering, IIIT Hyderabad * Center for Distance Education at University of ...
. 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 ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
-centric. Some OpenWindows applications were never released as open source by Sun, so some of these have been rewritten and some are still missing.


See also

*
Xsun Xsun is an X Window System (X11) display server implementation included with Solaris, developed by Sun Microsystems. It replaced the older Xnews server, which supported the display of not only X11 applications, but also NeWS and SunView programs. ...


References

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


External links

* * {{X desktop environments and window managers Sun Microsystems software Desktop environments