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 ... "

Comments

Standardized?

[Rahga]

"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.

Bring out your dead?!?

[Mike Greaves]

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.

I can't believe it hasn't been said yet

[donglekey]

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.

Interesting idea.

[jd]

IMHO, the more =open= toolkits that are out there, the better. Each can borrow the "useful" parts from the others, which will slowly bring them together.

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.)

SGI Motif is prettier than standard Motif

[Mike Greaves]

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.