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Indigo Magic Desktop, Now On Linux
xynopsis writes: "Based on the Indigo Magic Desktop on Irix, this Linux version contains a new window manager called 5dwm, an enhanced Motif library that supports the Irix look and feel, and widget sets specific to SGI. IMD goes further than those "themes" available that simulates the Irix desktop experience by allowing applications written in Irix to be ported to Linux with little modification in the GUI front-end. Linuxworld.com recently interviewed its creator, Eric Masson, who is single-handedly porting this great Unix desktop to Linux." Quote: "The first major difference between GNOME and IMD is the low-level API being used. In the case of GNOME it's GTK+, originally developed for the popular GIMP application, whereas for IMD it's Motif, a much more mature and standardized API ... "
Everyone I know -- including myself -- thinks this when first moving from an MS-Windows system to 4Dwm. (I don't know what the differences are between 4Dwm and this new 5dwm, so I'll stick to what I know.)
Then we all just eventually realize that we've fallen for Microsoft's trap: we've been trained to believe that the MS desktop and wm behavior are how a computer should behave. Once we get ourselves over that hurdle -- for example, right clicking on an object directly doesn't work, one must left click to select, and then right click to get the menu, which does come in useful occasionally -- we fly.
Still, I agree with you about KDE2. I like it better than 4Dwm, modulo the two or three annoying nonfatal bugs.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Partially right - Mozilla uses it's own widget set for drawing buttons, boxes etc. in web pages, and it uses it's own setup - XUL (I believe) to create the surrounding application - eg menus, buttons etc. However Mozilla uses GDK for drawing it all to the screen, rather than xlib or motif etc. GDK is what GTK uses to draw, and it's sorta part of GTK.
It turns out that the big visual effects production company Rhythm and Hues (R&H) and compositing software developer Silicon Grail have each contributed the time of one programmer toward the task of extending GIMP to 16-bit-per-channel images. Way to go, John Hughes and Ray Feeney!
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
"for IMD it's Motif, a much more mature and standardized API ... "
Standardized? Oh, you mean managed by an actual company and sold for $149. I fail to see how it is more mature and "standardized" than Visual Basic.
Sure, Gtk sprang from the loins of Gimp. But I fail to see why people continue to believe that just because Gtk+ started out to fill a specific purpose, that nowadays it is completely incapable of doing it's job, which is to provide a capable graphical toolkit.
I just observed in the comments that most people lumped Qt in with Gtk, etc as part of the non-professional alternatives to Motif.
Excuse me? Gtk is a typical open source project where developers get to it when they can get to it. Qt on the other hand, is a professional toolkit. It is created by a company that spends all of their time working on it. The Unix version also happens to be GPL.
IMO this makes Qt an extremely viable alternative to Motif. In fact, Borland thought so too: just look at Kylix. Qt is not "just another toolkit."
Has everyone forgotten that?
-Justin
My name is Indigo Magic Desktop. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
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FInally someone who admires OS/2's PM/WorkspaceShell! Someone should make a clone for Linux using Gtk/GNOME, instaed of that uggly Explorerish Nautilus!
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
right here
Tcl/Tk is pretty portable among Unices and available for Windows as well. If run on Windows, it looks like a native application. I prefer Perl::Tk which gives you the same GUI with the power of Perl. But this is not as easily portable because not every machine has the Tk module.
A lot of people may rag on IRIX, but for those of us who us it at work, this may be a godsend. Those machines are expensive as heck, and Exceed can't handle every application. Plus the option to port IRIX apps to an OS with excellent Java support is so awesome it makes me want to cry.
Nope, still ugly:
http://www.motifzone.net/themes/aqua.jpg
:P
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Instead you should learn to think for yourself, and hack for yourself!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well, that's a stupid idea. Because the minute the person learns how to do that, they come up with yet another stupid GUI toolkit for *NIX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
running an OpenGL app on XF86 is risky--they seem to bring down XF86 like 1 out of 4 times, and my IRIX box (of course) never fails to perform the required task
Huh? 1 out of 4 times? Maybe it's your code, your implimentation of OpenGL, BSD?? Who knows... I have quite a few programs that run w/OpenGL on Intel hardware and I have no problems at all.
FUD man...
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
Uhhh, its not the BSD implementation of OpenGL thats the problem there son. It's X.
Take a look at this IRIX Theme. You'll find it l33t0. A rather full E theme of IRIX's desktop. Has over 100+ original icons etc.
Do you know what your talking about/asking? Windows is an operating system, providing (too damn few, IMO) useful services to programmers and users. Motif is a set of libraries implementing stuff used in GUIs on X11, as well as some standards for look and feel. This includes widgets, gadgets, IPC, resource management, etc.
You don't 'customize' widget sets -- you customize applications, for instance your window manager. Adding new context menus in (finally) Windows 2000 is a customization of the Windows Presentation Manager, or whatever they call their window manager these days. This option is a nice addition to Windows 2000, but it represents a tiny part of what you might want to customize, and doesn't hold a candle to the customizeability of any window manager I've used under X11. Can you change the bindings on the keys and mouse? Can you change the location, shape, and contents of the title bars? The KDE window manager (kwm?) is okay, and evidently very flexible even though that flexibility isn't exposed through the gui configurator (or wasn't the last time I used it).
When you say you've used Motif, I expect you mean the Motif Window Manager, or mwm. Although this is the default wm on a lot of workstations, I don't actually know anybody that liked it. And the scary 'managability' that you mention probably comes from generality. fvwm is much nicer, IMO, for configuring, and the newer Gnome stuff is pretty easy through the fairly extensive gui configuration programs (but editing textfiles is still the most powerful).
Pure functionality is an interesting term, since it implies some sort of objectivity. I think what you must mean is "The Windows and MacOS window managers are my favorites". Neither one of these supports multiple virtual desktops, AFAIK. Neither one has the variety of applets and monitors that are available via KDE or GNOME or FVWM. And neither one provides decent command-line interfaces -- you can't resize the DOS prompt, no tab completion, no shell language worth speaking of, they don't even install doskey by default. No wonder Windows users are afraid of command line interfaces, the one provided by Windows is so bad!
I have no idea what you mean by "On PDA's, PalmOS follows a close second" -- second to what? Windows on PC? Again, I expect you're talking about window managers, not widget sets or operating systems. And comparing PDAs to PCs is stupid.
Overall, you sound a little confused about the structure of your operating environment. Linux in a nutshell: 1) kernel, 2) shell, 3) X11, 4) window manager. I can't really do Windows in a nutshell, because I'm really not that familiar with it. But I think it's all one big tangled ball of twine, which in Linux would be something like: 1) kernel+shell+X11, 2) window manager, 3) other parts of shell and X11. If you want to pick a fight, try to argue that the Windows model is better for security, stability, or performance.
Oh, and OS/2's Presentation Manager kicked Windows' and MacOS' window managers collective asses! =-)
Exactly *what* is that supposed to mean? BeOS is nothing like UNIX. About as much as NT is like UNIX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Wait... I'm not done yet. Are you implying that BeOS is somehow *not* innovative? That somehow the speed, the technological tricks, the pervasive use of messaging and its attendant benifets (apps work seamlessly together, common systems such as contact databases are shared through standard APIs, alls apps are automagically scriptable, drag and drop actually WORKS, etc), the ease of use, etc, is less innovative than anything GNOME or KDE have managed to spew out? Aside from Rasterman's EVAS and some other fringe (relativly) projects, I have yet to see anything as innovative come out from any Linux projects. Refined? Sure. Tweeked? Why not. Evolutionary? Maybe. Innovative? Hell no.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Because the practice of using different toolkits on the same machine should be stamped out with extreme prejudice! It boggles the mind that Linux-lusers, all caught up in their self-rightous jihad to have as many different toolkits as possible, under the excuse of fostering competition, never realize what the best way to foster competition is. Open STANDARDS. There needs to be ONE (uno, un, ack, 1 25^0) standard API. Toolkits should serve as a back-end to that API. Then toolkits can compete based on quality/speed/stability alone, not the artificial bounds of software base! It takes power away from the evil software developers and puts it back into the hands of the USER! THAT is real freedom!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Slashdot is *still* using the old Silicon Graphics logo. The company is now just "SGI" and has changed their logo almost two years ago. The Silicon Graphics "cube" logo was from the days of MIPS-based unix machines and overpriced Windows PCs. These days SGI sells not just unix boxes, but MANY different models of NT and Linux boxes, all with decent prices. Their new logo represents the future and the change of direction. Slashdot doesn't use the old rainbow Apple logo, why keep using the old Silicon Graphics logo?
Amongst *Working* Unix GUI coders, Motif usage probably exceeds that of all other toolkits combined. Can't prove it, but I'm fairly sure. From my experience with Unix commercial CAD/CAM systems: I've never seen one that used *anything* other than Motif.
Motif has flaws, but on technical grounds, is much more appropriate for "can't fail" applications than something like GTK+.
If you think that's dead, then you must be a little like the guy driving the dead wagon in the Holy Grail.
-- Mike Greaves
Probably...
If Linus would sanction one API that would have the advantage over tha others, most people would have less problems.
Yeah, and if Linus would sanction one OS kernel, then all the others would simply disappear, right?
Seriously, this is complete nonsense. Nobody can dictate what applications I would want to run (or the kernel for that matter). Would you switch mail-reader if Linus told you to? Would you use another windowing system than X if Linus told you to? Would you jump if Linus told you to?
Luckily, Linus is a sensible guy. I don't understand why otherwise intelligent people like you seem to think of him as some kind of omnipotent god, with the power to do anything he wants. Instead you should learn to think for yourself, and hack for yourself!
I've used Motif, and quite frankly the managability just scared me. KDE is my desktop of choice right now (although I would like more Linux apps developers to support the available menus).
In terms of pure functionality, Windows and MacOS are tied at first for me. On PDA's, PalmOS follows a close second (only problem-- limited resolution to draw new widgets).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Umm, it would be stupid to implement each toolkit into a graphics card because the toolkit does a lot more than drawing. GNOME, for example, as an entire application API. This means that the graphics card would go from being an ASIC (application specific integrated circut) to a general purpose CPU, since most of the toolkit code is just like regular application code. Also, the end result would be slower since most graphics cards run at a measly 200MHz and have only limited on-board resources, and aren't designed to run regular code, but do a very specific drawing task. Then, the fact that the graphics card is really a data-processor, rather than a command executer, would hurt performance. Lastly, apps constantly call toolkit code, and if that were on the graphics card, you'd have to access all app data over the AGP bus, which is a lot slower than the CPU accessing it over the system bus. What would make more sense, and this is what I think you were getting at, would be a graphics card that implemented something like Quartz into hardware. That way you could get all the nifty eye-candy, without the CPU cost.
;)
PS> You can get he benifets of having another processor doing toolkit code by getting an SMP machine
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Coupla bits o' info: Houdini was ported some time ago (a year? maybe more?). The latest linux journal has an entire article on how some folks ported a large Irix-based system to Irix (or something like that, maybe it was moving parts of the system to linux, but I do recall a section on prting irix code to linux). Sorry if this is hyperlink poor, but I just woke up... :)
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Well, there are cards already that have the entire OpenGL pipeline in silicon. Most workstation cards do, for example the 3dlabs Oxygen series. I think that with the addition of T&L the current gen of gaming cards comes close to full opengl-in-silicon if not completely attaining it (NB: these cards of course are not optimized for professional opengl work since they typically focus on speed over correctness).
Also, AFAIK most graphics cards today DO have operations to supprt windowing environment primitive drawing acceleration (things like quick rectangles, etc.). It's my impression that usually these are tailored to support the Windows GDI. Still I suspect that an enterprising wm author for another system could take advantage of common tasks if they had access to the asm calling specs.
You're definitely right about the more is good thing. Let a thousand different flowers bloom! :)
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I got Gnome and E running on my Indigo2 (bad quality screenshot here). However, I found it pretty slow and clunky compared to 4DWM (4DWM screenshot here. I got it running from the tardists downloaded from freeware.sgi.com - you need to download a lot of freeware libraries to get it going, but the tardist installer should iform you about dependancies.
That being said, I actually like 4DWM and the SGI desktop environment as a whole. It is very stable and I find it provides me with everything I want when coding on a *NIX system.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned this yet. If porting Irix applications is easy, Linux is about to get a huge huge push. I know that there have been articles and rumors about middle and high end 3D applications coming to Linux, but I haven't seen any actually materialize yet (feel free to prove me wrong because I may be). All the big players in 3D except for 3ds MAX (Tom Hudson!) are available for Irix - > Softimage , Maya , Lightwave , Houdini and a whole host of compositing and motion capture programs. If porting those to Linux is trivial then ports will be all the more likely.
Now you may think that it's not going to happen because "Linux people aren't the type to pay for software at all, let alone software that costs thousands of dollars." This is the wrong way to look at things, the 3D companies are probably asking themselves right now if the artists that use their products are the type of people to use Linux. I think that 3D artists are the most likly to use Linux with the exception of the fleets of hackers who already do. If you have ever used a powerful 3D application you know that they are very complex. Learning Linux is a small price to pay for reliability a magnatude higher than NT. Linux drops out the cost of the OS too of course, and when dealing with Irix, that can add up. All those computers in the render farm no longer have to eat up licenses.
Now you may also think "That's great if a niche market uses Linux but I don't think it will make a huge difference." Think about this then. Photoshop is the standard imaging tool, hands down. Now if Linux takes a chunk out of the graphics market, guess what sweet application could replace it while saving $600 for every computer its used? I shouldn't have to say it, but the Gimp would shine. Graphics studios of any magnatude have armies of programmers on hand, sometimes more programmers than animators. Think what they would do if they got their hands on an open source program like The Gimp that lets them not only script simple tools very easily but extend the very program itself. If they played nice with others then the Gimp could get alot better, really fast. And how many other programs could make headway at the same time?
I know that this might seems like a jump in logic from having an Irix wm ported to Linux, but if Linux can make headway in the graphics market, cool shit will happen. The graphics scene doesn't care what everyone else uses for the most part. Studios of something of a blackbox alot of the time and if one tool works better for them, but no one else uses it, it doesn't matter. So Linux wouldn't even be a difficult transition when compared to what the average buisness would have to do to put Linux on desktops.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
What the hell? How did this get modded up to +3?
What's the advantage of Motif over something like Windows?
I was going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "Win32" until I read the rest of the post. I don't think he understands what the difference is between a widget toolkit (GTK+, Motif, GUI portion of Win32 API), an operating system (Windows, MacOS), and a desktop environment (KDE).
Themes are supported (and Windows was the first OS to really allow this anyway).
I can't decide if this is complete native cluelessness, or a plain and simple flamebait/troll. Really, not one of the UI toolkits "allows" or "disallows" theming - some just make it easier to do than others - and quite frankly, theming in Win32 is a fscking nightmare, messing with crappily documented non-client area messages, superclassing windprocs etc. If anything they tried hard to make it NOT themable (apart from the plus pack allowing you to set some colours, fonts and a background picture, that doesn't count, you aren't changing the UI.)
Sorry I got carried away. While Linux does have some innovative projects (like EVAS), I would still argue that much of Linux is about freedom (OSS) and incremental quality increases, rather revolutionary ideas.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Based on my recent experiences with 4Dwm, here's how to simulate it easily on Linux by using fvwm2.
1. Enlist a friend. Get them to administer a strong kick to your head. This will make you forget about the extensive customizability of fvwm, and stick with changing a small number of useless settings.
2. Get your friend to administer another strong kick to your head. This will mess up your vision so that fvwm's window titles and desktop pager appear very large, taking up a disproportionate amount of the screen. It should also affect your motor control, so you have to click twice to change desktops.
3. A third strong boot to the head may be required to forget all the keyboard shortcuts you have in fvwm. This may have already taken place due to the previous steps.
If you haven't guessed, I've got a favourite between fvwm and 4Dwm....
Peter
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
Well, I've tried Irex for E, and it's pretty good (there is a gtk+ partner theme). Also just now while googling for a cache'd page of the very slashdotted 5dwm.org site, I ran across an IMD clone done using FVWM2. Note that I have only the most cursory user experience with SGIs (too po' to afford one of them on my own :-( ), so I can't comment on exactingly true either one is to the IMD.
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This seems to be one more piece to that puzzle, which is great! More power to those releasing it!
The only thing that's missing, IMHO, is graphics hardware. Actually carving the latest & greatest toolkits into silicon. (No, not as embedded code, with a processor to run it. Actually re-implement the code into actual dedicated hardware.)
IMHO, the first company (or geek) out with a card that'll handle the X11R6.4 protocol, plus the library APIs from Qt/KDE-2.1, Gtk/GLib-2.0, Gnome, OpenMotif-x.y (or Lesstif), OpenGL (or MESA), and this new Indigo Magic code, will slaughter the market on graphics.
I mean, who would =CARE= what the video card itself could do, if you already have all those capabilities? More to the point, more than a few graphics cards'll use "softcode" implementations, because they're easy to do and easy to maintain.
More to the point, by implementing the libraries, rather than a few trivial low-level graphics functions, we might yet see =very= high-powered window managers that don't require half the planet's computing power to get past the splash-screen.
(I like Enlightenment, KWM, Sawfish, etc, but I'd like them a whole lot more if I could get the same power without the memory & CPU costs.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And to me, standard Motif doesn't look particularly bad. On top of that, some folks have been recently working on theming Motif. Check out http://www.motifzone.net .
So "it's ugly" isn't a very sound criticism of Motif anymore. Other criticisms, typically about run-time efficiency or difficulty of the API, are basically false. I found Motif easier to learn, a couple of years back, than GTK+. The API *is* very large, but fairly consistent. And any toolkit API will grow as it strives for more capabilities. This has happened and will happen more to GTK+ and Qt.
Please remember that *almost* *all* Unix commercial applications use Motif. And it works well for open-source apps too. My favorite: NEdit, can be safely described as So Good I Can Hardly Believe It.
-- Mike Greaves
I have an SGI Indy with Indigo Magic, and it's not that great... the main things I liked about the IRIX experience weren't really UI related - good online docs (effectively all the manuals in PDF), good integrated multimedia support (digicam etc) and ISDN/PPP support with sensible setup. I always thought the desktop was kind of clunky.
Of course, the site is already toast, so it's possible that it's a huge improvement, but IM as of IRIX 6.2 is no great shakes. I'd rather have KDE2 from what I have seen of that.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"