Common Desktop Environment - ArchWiki

Jump to content

# Common Desktop Environment

From ArchWiki

The Common Desktop Environment is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX98 Workstation Product Standard, and was long the "classic" Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. Despite being a legacy environment, it is still kept alive with support for Linux systems as well.

Tip: CDE used to have issues such as running rpcbind in insecure mode or lack of 64 bit version. That has been taken care of with recent versions. 64 bit is usable, it is stable now, and rpcbind no longer requires insecure mode to be ran. Development for Common Desktop Environment is currently very active.

## Installation

The base CDE system is installed through the cdesktopenvAUR AUR package.

## Usage

### dtlogin

The cdesktopenvAUR package supplies the `dtlogin` systemd service which upon starting will launch the CDE login manager.

### xinit

CDE can be directly launched with `startx` (install xorg-xinit):

    $ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/dt/bin
    $ export LANG=C
    $ startx /usr/dt/bin/Xsession

## References

- Common Desktop Environment Wiki

Category:

- Desktop environments