The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) was the dominant desktop on
proprietary Unix systems in the 90's. In 2012 it was relicensed under
GPL2 and has seen modest maintenance from the community. Although
functional, it is of course a very old desktop, and some parts of it,
such as the mail application, are not likely useful in a modern setting.
(NsCDE is a good alternative if you want a modern CDE look-a-like)
Nevertheless, people still use it today, for nostalgia, if nothing else.

PS: The RPC service needs to be running for CDE to work:

# chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.rpc
# /etc/rc.d/rc.rpc   start

PPS: gawk is symlinked to nawk, since CDE "needs" nawk to work.


Optional dtlogin instructions:

For security, CDE probably shouldn't be your main internet facing
desktop, but if you want to use the native CDE login manager, change the
"x1:4:respawn..." line in /etc/inittab to:

x1:4:respawn:/usr/dt/bin/dtlogin


Optional Calendar instructions:


If you want to use the Calendar application, you need the inetd and cmsd
daemons, and you need to configure some additional files:

# chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.cmsd
# chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd
# /etc/rc.d/rc.cmsd  start
# /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd start

In addition to the default localhost lines, you need to add the following
to /etc/hosts, run uname -n to get the value of "myname.my.domain":

127.0.0.1    myname    myname.my.domain
::1          myname    myname.my.domain

Finally, you need some lines in /etc/inetd.conf:

dtspc    stream tcp     nowait root /usr/dt/bin/dtspcd /usr/dt/bin/dtspcd
cmsd/2-5 dgram  rpc/udp wait   root /usr/dt/bin/rpc.cmsd rcp.cmsd

PS: A bug in the CDE cmsd daemon prevents it from starting at boot, you
can either start it manually or add the following to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.cmsd ]; then
  /etc/rc.d/rc.cmsd start
fi