It's not "Lord of the Rings" but this is certainly a fellowship.

Ximian, Inc., Wipro, and Sun Microsystems Monday say they will jointly develop an open source desktop environment for the Solaris Operating Environment (OE) based on the upcoming GNOME 2.0.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun says it expects to deliver the finished product in the third quarter of this year. The new environment is planned for availability on the Solaris 8 OE and higher.

GNOME is an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment (Pronounced guh-nome.). The system is part of the GNU project and part of the free software, or open source, movement. The Windows-like desktop system works on UNIX and UNIX-like systems and is not dependent on any one-window manager. The current version runs on Linux, FreeBSD, IRIX and Solaris.

The main objective of GNOME is to provide a user-friendly suite of applications and an easy-to-use desktop.

Wipro's Platforms Group will coordinate the overall development effort, carry out the integration of the GNOME solution with the existing CDE (Common Desktop Environment) environment and provide complete life-cycle maintenance in the post-release phase.

Ximian will be supplying the desktop platform including an intuitive graphical user interface for easy navigation to menus and applications; user personalization and customization; access to a wealth of productivity tools; open standards; drag and drop file management and Internet browsing.

Sun says the agreement serves as a culmination of multiple Sun contributions to the GNOME project and is an indication of Sun's continued commitment and support of open source efforts.

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"What GNOME provides is a modern component-based design for a true next-generation desktop environment for our enterprise customers," says Sun Desktop and StarOffice products vice president and general manager Mike Rogers. "GNOME provides a unified and advanced graphical user interface for UNIX and Linux systems. Working with Ximian and Wipro, Sun will provide our Solaris software enterprise customers a high quality and rich offering that integrates the GNOME modern accessible desktop with a suite of applications, accessories and utilities, StarOffice and Netscape to meet the everyday needs of business organizations. This partnership will help drive a higher quality product, faster time to market and focused resources for further contributions to the GNOME open source project."

For its part, Sun plans to provide CDE and the GNOME 2.0 Desktop with the next major release of the Solaris OE. In addition, users can run CDE and applications based on Java technology on the GNOME desktop unmodified. With that in mind, Sun plans to offer a modern desktop with a suite of productivity applications.

Sun has been at the front of the open source movement. On Feb. 7, Sun announced it intends to more actively participate in the work of the open source and Linux communities by offering expertise and key software components of its Solaris Operating Environment.