One of the great joys that I have in life is that I get to test software from Blastwave. This means that I get the “new toys” for Solaris and OpenSolaris before most anyone else. Most people are familiar with both GNOME and KDE ( and CDE and OpenWindows ) and know that the new fully loaded desktops require horsepower and RAM. Well here is a very nice desktop for those of us that still have older hardware running.

    Olivier Fourdan is the creator of Xfce which he describes like so :

“Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.”

    The real truth is that Xfce is easy to use, easy to configure and fast on older systems with very little resources. Just to prove the point I loaded Xfce onto my old Sun Ultra 1 170E which runs Solaris 8 and has 256Mb of RAM. I went one step further and logged into Xfce over a 10Mb/sec half duplex network via dtlogin. I think that the screenshots speak for themselves :


The Xfce Desktop is both elegant and efficient.



I don't recommend that you try working with the latest and greatest Java development IDE on an old system with little in the way of RAM or horsepower. If you are forced to run a large and modern application on an old system then I suggest that you use Xfce as your desktop.

Dennis Clarke
Admin & Director
Blastwave.org