First of all, welcome to LQ. Anyways, just wondering, Sun has always been more of a maker of enterprise products....would there be any major compelling reasons to switch from my current setup (SUSE 9.1 Professional Edition) to JDS. I read another post where you said JDS is very integrated. What do you mean by this???

Also, to do with Project Looking Glass....since Sun has decided to GPL this project...will it appear in many other distros (eg SUSE, Mandrake). I'm not going to ask about Red Hat....they could care less about Eye Candy (I have always found their products look ugly). How long till this project will be usable (it says on your website that only a few apps work properly with it).

JDS is absolutely perfect for home users as that is all I have and I have even got my father-in-law converted to JDS now. And he is reading the new book that was released on JDS Linux Called “Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop”. The book in my opinion was written for windows users, introducing them to Linux although it still has some interesting pages and explanations for those that wants to get down to the neety and gretty of it.

Also if you are interested I have a number of scripts that will help you to setup and run lg3d (as a proof of concept) I have also got a number of screen shots running epiphany, gimp, mozilla, etc.

If you are interested in trying it out I'll be happy in trying to set it up with you, (my only experience of installing and using lg3d on JDS).

Kind Regards,

Ricardo W.

A lot of JDS users are home users. But, you are correct, it was aimed at the enterprise.

You can run Looking Glass (lg3d) on Red Hat, Fedora and SuSE as well as JDS.

To make JDS more consumer oriented, visit http://jdshelp.org - which is our community site set up for home users. We have a large repository of rpms, howtos and a knowledgebase for JDS.

What kind of demos is Sun willing to offer for this product? I could not find any on your website...altho I may just be blind today and have missed it . I am the type of person where I need to use something before I make a final decision. I would probably install it in Windows in MS Virtual PC to give it a test run if it is possible to download a trial.

rm6990 There is a book called "Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop" and that comes with a live CD that you allows you to play JDS without affecting your existing Installation.

I got my copy from amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...572061-8020631

And it was well worth buying it.

rm6990:

Sun doesn't offer a downloadable trial. I'm working with them to put their LiveCD (Morphix based) up to download.

If they have a problem with putting the trial up, I'll let you know how to get one for free via mail.

Tad,

Morphix is debian based so how would it work as a demo of JDS?

I guess what I'm sort of getting at is the bad reputation .rpm has as a program installation tool. So demoing a .deb based distro for a .rpm based one is odd at best and disingenuous on the conspiracy theory end heh. But perhaps I'm way off base. Perhaps what JDS really is just Sun's version of Gnome desktop and doesn't necessarily refer to the type of linux maybe?

/confused

thanks a ton,

Rob

I think you are correct there...JDS can be installed on Solaris (soon to be I think) and on Linux...so it has nothing really to do with the underlying OS. Also, since it is a live CD, people demoing the product probably won't touch the package manager...espescially considering the audience it targets. I doubt many Slackware or Debian users are considering switching to JDS

Tad, Rob

JDS is both a Desktop and a GNU/Linux distribution. It will run on Debian and does as a desktop. It also is an option on Solaris 9 which runs on JavaStations. It will be an option on all Solaris 10 distributions.

JDS's demo is Morphix and if someone wanted to rebuilt it with the latest grub installer, it would install and run and use Debian packages.

In China it runs on a different Linux platform created by the government's 12 company consortium.

interesting. Thanks for info Tad.

Rob

[confused] Is it rpm or deb based? If it has a linux kernel, how can they not give you a free version?[/confused]

Are there any ports for PPC on the horizon?

From what I've learned it is .rpm based and was built on Suse code.

The GPL doesn't require a company or person to provide their linux solution for free only that the source code be available and then its only parts of the source code that is GPL related, proprietory parts they've made (Xandros file manager for example) that are not made with GPL source do not have to be revealed.

PPC ports: I doubt it. There are a few PPC distros out there though including Yellowdog, Gentoo, and I think even Mandrake has a PPC version.

The Retail product is rpm based.

The DEMO (Free Release) is Debian based - re: Morphix/Knoppix

The Chinese Version is based on some Chinese distribution - not Red Flag.

The Solaris version is pkg based.

Sorry for the confusion.

I beleive the Chinese version is called NeoShine Desktop, and there StarOffice is marketed as NeoShine Office (also OpenOffice.org -based)

-Sam Hiser

The Chinese version is called NeoShine, which is based on JDS.
not the vice versa.