Slashdot Mirror
SGI & The IMD4Linux Project?
thomas536 asks: "I have been following the IMD4Linux Project and am currently using their desktop. The project developer has recently had some difficulty receiving a response from SGI concerning SGI's licensing and a possible partnership between SGI and IMD4Linux. This has resulted in him posting his last letter on the project website. Can anybody in the Slashdot community help him generate a (hopefully positive) response from SGI in this matter?"
That has to be the ugliest desktop I've ever seen.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
form -> from
seams -> seems
I don't know anything about the project, but from the information on the website it seems that it is an extension of SGI's source code. How did the author get the source code in the first place to extend? Why would he expect, other than verbal assurances from sources inside SGI, that he would be licensed to release the code.
Likewise, if he intends to release the code under the GPL, he is essentially forcing SGI to release their code under GPL because he would not be able to relicense the code otherwise.
But can someone explain what this project is all about? There is a myriad of things that seem to be going on, but it is hard to nail down what the project in its entirety is about.
I have been pwned because my
Its actually moderately smexy in action. Not as nice as gnome 2.2 imnsho.
What's not clear from reading the article is exactly what prior relationship with sgi this guy has. It sounds like he has the source to all their code, including inventor and all that. Did he find a print-out in a dumpster and decide to start this project, then hope they'd climb on board? If so, he's lucky he's not a smoking boot right about now.
Hasn't SGI been extremely negative about Motif clones? I recall the olden days when Lesstif was vital (but rarely operable) but now a Motif clone just seems like an anacronism.
I was just thinking about looking at that project a couple of hours ago, and now it's gone and gotten slashdotted.
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
From following some of what this guy has posted on his site before, i recall him working on Open Inventor. Is all the code referred to not currently GPL'd, including IMD, or does he just want to GPL IMD alone?
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
I love the project's goal: to take SGI's well known desktop environment and re-create it to run on Linux. I'm not surprised that SGI hasn't done this before themselves or has given him any "blessings" that he's looking for. 4Dwm/5Dwm is old and kind of antiquated as a desktop, but still remains fast and stable. I have several SGI Indys, Octanes, and Indigos that I still run to this day, if only for nostalgia. I really like those Indys as they make great web servers. On the other hand, the desktop interface is antiquated and you can find most of the features in other WMs (such as Enlightenment). Either way, I don't think SGI will sue him for releasing his code. I'm afraid SGI might not even be around in 10 years for anyone to even care. Has anyone even seen the cost of buying Irix CDs? Although they still update the OS, who would buy them except for people like me who remember what it was like to work with these machines in their hayday?
When I did work experience at SGI, I really liked the way 4dwm worked, so I asked some engineers there how I could get this running at home, and they actually told me to try 5dwm. I know that's no endorsement by them, but it shows that they do know about the project.
Perhaps I am missing something. One of the first things I did when I upgraded the disk in my Indy was to put Gnome on it, because in my opinion 4DWM is a lousy environment.
Perhaps somebody could enlighten me (no pun intended) about what makes 4DWM so great?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Okay, blatant plug, since I wrote this, but if you like the IMD's scalable icons you can have them under Gnome.
r .bz2.
.svg icons from the IRIX .fti icons, I wrote a perl script to do just that:
I created a Gnome SVG icon set of almost all of the SGI icons:
http://www.webninja.com/files/Iris-0.4.ta
Additionally, if you would rather generate your own
http://www.webninja.com/files/fti2svg.pl
You can see a screenshot here:
http://www.webninja.com/files/fti2svg.png
I actually improved on the originals a little. fti icons have a very limited color palette, and simulate other colors using dithering, the generated svg files use the actual color that was trying to be achieved. Additionally, fti icons have a color called 'shadow' that is generally used for drop-shadows. The generated svg files apply a 50% alpha to the 'shadow' color for a little extra eye candy. Gnome also antialiases svg icons, whereas IRIX does not (unless you have an Octane or newer and are running at least IRIX 6.5.22, this is a recent addition)
`fortune -o`
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge SGI fan from way back. Indigo Magic was a great environment in it's time and if you forget everything you know about any other environment it holds up well on its own. However, there are many usability issues that have been addressed in other UI's that haven't been (and my guess probably never will) in Indigo Magic.
Seems to me we should borrow the good things from it and incorporate it into KDE and Gnome. The sparkle thing on app start up is cool, do that. The simplicity of the Toolchest is great, do that. The zoom thumbwheel is cool, do that. Icons, ok.
I'm just saying we've come a long way, baby, and to want to use Indigo Magic as it is would be a good-sized step back.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Innovation well before it's time.
Today everyone is concerned with transparent windows and skins and other eye candy, and not features that make things like file managers easier to use.
He obviously used Microsoft Word or Outlook to write the message because it is infested with MS proprietary quotation marks. Yes, I'm serious. Microsoft put curly quotes and some other symbols in the reserved range of the ISO-8859 and Unicode character sets. Non-MS-Windows computers display them in different interesting ways. Netscape on Linux shows them as question marks which makes his letter look even more horrible.
I used to work with Eric Masson (he was the new "architect").
He was always battling it out with SGI on one level or another.. sad, really, since it doesn't actually COMPETE with any of their products (if you buy an SGI, you're not doing it because you like their widgets.)
S