Common Desktop Environment

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a Proprietary software desktop environment for UNIX, based on the Motif (widget toolkit) widget toolkit. It is also the standard desktop environment on Hewlett-Packard OpenVMS.

CDE was jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems in The Open Group. It was based on HP s VUE (Visual User Environment).

Until about 2000, CDE was considered the de facto standard for UNIX desktops, but at that time, free software desktop environments such as KDE and GNOME were quickly becoming mature, and became almost universal on the Linux platform, which already had a larger user base than most commercial Unixes in total. In 2001, commercial Unix vendors Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX) and Sun Microsystems (Solaris Operating Environment) announced that they would phase out CDE as the standard desktop on their workstations, in favor of GNOME.

In Solaris 10 Sun included both the CDE and the Java Desktop System. However, in April 2003, HP reportedly opted to return to CDE, as GNOME has not stabilised sufficiently for their preference. It has been suggested that the non-frozen APIs are the main complaint.

=External links=

*Linux - [http://www.xig.com/Pages/DeXtop/CDE-GUI.html CDE] *AIX operating system - [http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/cde/ CDE] *HP-UX - [http://docs.hp.com/en/B1171-90103/index.html CDE] *Solaris Operating Environment - [http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/cde/ CDE] *[http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/node2.html Tutorial for the CDE] *[http://www.opengroup.org/cde/ Open Group - CDE]