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Before you try to build, please check the status of your distribution/platform. It may save you a lot of hassle.

CDE - The Common Desktop Environment is X Windows desktop environment that was commonly used on commercial UNIX variants such as Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX. Developed between 1993 and 1999, it has now been released under an Open Source licence by The Open Group.

To help answer peoples inevitable questions please have a look at the [What is CDE?] and [QandA] pages.

Current State

CDE currently works on several Unix systems. See [SupportedPlatforms] for a current list.

Starting with version 2.4.0a, we are now using GNU autoconf for building rather than the obsoleted and no longer supported Imake.

Original Reference Platforms

In 1999 the reference platforms on which CDE was built were;

Supplier	Platform	OS
Digital	AlphaStation 200	Digital UNIX V4.0
Fujitsu	DS/90 7000	UXP/DS V20L10
HP	HP9000/7xx	HP-UX 10.01
IBM	RS/6000	AIX 4.2
Novell	Intel 486/Pentium	UnixWare 2.02
Sun	SPARCstation	Solaris 2.4

Getting involved

There are many ways to get involved, but it should be made clear that at the moment there are no pre-compiled binaries available for systems so for now, you will need to compile it from source.

In particular please get in touch if you're interested in the following;

• Porting or re-porting CDE to various UNIX systems, in particular if you wish to continue supporting the platforms listed above in 'Original Reference Platforms'. Note, as of version 2.3 many of these reference platforms have been removed due to bit rot. At this point, if you want to support these systems, you should probably start over from scratch.
• Packaging binaries for various systems and Linux distributions
• Enhancing CDE in some way
• Bug fixing
• Janitorial work: fixing compiler warnings, converting old code to modern standards, etc
• QA work: testing builds, testing on various platforms, update the wikis, documentation ...

You can get in touch with us in the following ways;

• Join the Developer Mailing List
• Join us on IRC in #cde on Libera, using an IRC client or the web client.

We are currently requesting that all contributions to the project are licenced under the MIT licence. Find out why?

Security Note

CDE has had quite a few known security vulnerabilities in it, and it is likely that several more unknown ones still exist. Don't expose it to the Internet. In fact, never expose any desktop to the Internet.

You should think strongly about enabling the dtspcd and rpc.ttdbserver daemons. Unless you know what they do, you almost certainly don't need them.

The following advisories have no traced resolution in this release;

1. xxxxxx - 1999-11-xx - http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1999-11.html
2. 179804 - 2004-03-23 - http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/179804

Project Admins:

• Peter Howkins
• Jon Trulson

Project Members:

• -
• Aaron W. Hsu
• Alex Madama
• Anders Bergwall
• Antonis Tsolomitis
• Christopher Turkel
• Cy Schubert
• Danilo Pecher
• Douglas Carmichael
• Eugene Doudine
• Jon Trulson (admin)
• Jose Rubio
• Karsten Pedersen
• Lev Kujawski
• Matthew Howkins
• Matthew Trower
• Neil Zieses
• Paolo Vincenzo Olivo
• Pascal Stumpf
• Pascal de Bruijn
• All Members

Project screenshots

2 - More Applications

4 - The Style Manager

5 - The File Manager

6 - Just Another Window Manager

3 - Help Systems

1 - Applications

---

[orhank]

My beautiful CDE 2.50 segfaults after upgrading to Debian 12. Here are some lines from errorlog:
*** INFORMATION(0): dtwm: PID 35404: Sun Jun 18 17:04:45 2023
Workspace Manager: XmeRenderTableGetDefaultFont() failed, trying a fixed font
[140 bytes]

*** ERROR(4): dtsession: PID 35405: Sun Jun 18 17:04:45 2023
Unable to exec ibus-ui-gtk3.
[ENOENT (2)] No such file or directory[130 bytes]

And some lines from startlog:
--- execing /usr/dt/bin/dtsession ...
not execing /home/orhan/.profile (see /home/orhan/.dtprofile)
/bin/bash: line 1: 35799 Segmentation fault /usr/dt/bin/dtsession > /dev/null 2>&1

Can anyone help please? (I get the same errors when I try CDE 2.51, too.)

[Ogis]

Hello.

I have exactly the same problem with exactly same error message about XmeRenderTableGetDefaultFont() failed, trying a fixed font.

I'm using Debian 12.1 and I compiled CDE from git using the instructions on the wiki. When I first started the system, everything was fine. I changed the decoration theme. When I logged out and logged back in, I decided to take another look at the style manager. When I clicked on the style manager, the CDE simply crashed. After logging in again, when I clicked on the exit button, no confirmation window appeared and CDE simply logged out. I decided to remove the .dt folder. After removing this folder, everything started working as it should. But after logging out and logging back in, what I wrote earlier came up....All I can say is a very disappointing experience….

P.S.

I also tried CDE, which can be installed from the office package archive. I am talking about Sparky Linux 7.0.1, which is based on Debian 12 version. Sparky Linux 7.1 in KVM, the same problem as I described. CDE crashed.....