What Is the Solaris Common Desktop Environment?

In March of 1993, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Novell announced an agreement to develop a graphical user interface that would bring a consistent look and feel to major UNIX system-based workstations and desktop computers. From the start, the CDE development effort was guided by one goal: to make UNIX easier to use for end users and application developers.

The result of this joint development effort is the Common Desktop Environment. CDE is one of two desktops packaged with the Solaris 7 environment (the other is the OpenWindows desktop). Over time, CDE will emerge as the standard desktop for Sun, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and many others in the UNIX workstation market. With the release of Solaris 7, Sun has enhanced CDE with many new desktop features not included in the previous versions of CDE. Some of these new features are described later in this chapter.

Solaris CDE includes a desktop server, a Session Manager, a Window Manager (based on Hewlett-Packard's Visual User Environment), and numerous desktop utilities.

To learn how to use Solaris CDE, see Solaris Common Desktop Environment: User's Guide.

Developers, End Users, and CDE

Because CDE provides a consistent computing environment across major UNIX platforms, end users can easily move between different machines. CDE also aids application development by supplying a single, standard set of programming interfaces for any conforming Sun, HP, IBM, and Novell platform. A single API enables developers to create applications that are consistent in appearance and behavior across CDE-compliant systems.

The CDE development environment is based on the X11R5 server and produces applications with a look and feel based on the Open Software Foundation's Motif 1.2 specification.