Once upon a time there was OPENSTEP for Solaris. It ran on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6, on older 32-bit SPARC hardware. Many people wanted to run OPENSTEP/Solaris, with its unique look and its useful OPENSTEP apps, on newer SPARC hardware under newer versions of Solaris. Alas, this wasn't possible, as the assumptions made in the original OPENSTEP/Solaris broke under newer versions.
Enter LuBu OpenMagic. This is a largely unauthorized rewrite of the non-binary parts of OPENSTEP to allow it to run on newer versions of Solaris, specifically versions 8, 9 and 10. Because the binaries are still compiled for SPARC machines, it will function only on SPARC hardware.
It succeeds in providing the OPENSTEP look and feel on Solaris, better than Window Maker can. It's not quite as snappy as OPENSTEP on Mach, but it's faster than JDS and better looking than CDE. Because it uses Sun's Display Postscript extensions to X, and therefore uses the X Window System to display graphics, other X applications like StarOffice and Firefox can be run alongside OPENSTEP apps.
All in all, LuBu OpenMagic is an interesting repackaging of OPENSTEP for newer Solaris versions. It's not a complete replacement for OPENSTEP/Mach for SPARC hardware, but it's a lot more flexible.
System Requirements
- Hardware platform: Sun4m or Sun4u
- OS version: Solaris 7 or later, with the X Window System.
- Processor: Sun SuperSPARC, MicroSPARC, HyperSPARC or UltraSPARC, 36MHz or greater. UltraSPARC-II at 300MHz or higher recommended.
- RAM: 128MB or greater. 384MB or greater recommended.
- Disk space: 100MB free