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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?"
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.
Clearly you haven't seen the other Motif desktops then. It's "the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows 3.1"
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?
The chunky Motif widgets look perhaps just a bit dated, compared to todays mostly 'flat' widget looks, but that's just fashion really. Indigo Magic was an amazing desktop though, you have to use it to appreciate it. Especially the icon-zoom widget used in Indigo Magic's file browser - it had a thumbwheel along the side which you could roll to zoom in and out, and the vector drawn icons would smoothly zoom in and out. Also, there were neat eye-candy things thrown in for when you double-clicked on an icon - the icon would have an animated sparkle while the app started. The whole desktop was just nicely integrated, everything used SGI's Motif-extended IMD widgets. Really nice.
:). Other systems were still using TWM or OpenLook. Indigo Magic Desktop still holds it own today against the likes of GNOME 2, even with the
What you have to remember is that this desktop came into being around 94 or so. I'm not quite sure when, but I was using it in 95. It was just amazingly advanced, at least in terms of eye-candy
unfashionable chunky widget look.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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?
He didnt, AFAICT, it's a clone of SGI's Indigo Magic Desktop, including the window manager, 4Dwm (hence why his site is 5Dwm) and the widgets SGI added, as well as some of the apps. Read the information on the front page of the site a bit more carefully:
IMD4Linux is the IRIX Interactive Desktop rebuilt from scratch on Linux using today's technologies and SGI's Interactive Desktop as guideline.
The legal issues are presumably due to the use of SGI trademarks, which is hinted at in the letter, the bit where he says:
I changed the project name from 'Indigo Magic Desktop for Linux' to 'IMD4Linux'
However, it's hard to tell for sure as the site doesnt seem to have more in the way of detail on the SGI legal/whatever issues bar that letter of his. It does appear to be his source though.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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.
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`
4Dwm isn't really the great part, it's not all that different from mwm, it's the other things that make up the IMD (fm, toolchest, etc)
/hosts (I have a ton of NFS shares on my network, being able to just go to /hosts/hostname/sharename rather than creating a mount point, mounting, get what I need, unmount, is very nice. This is more an IRIX thing than an IMD thing, but whatever)
Things I really like about IMD:
1. Drop pockets (I just think this is a slick way to handle drag and drop)
2. The shelf (I can associate a different shelf with any directory, which has icons for the applications I am likely to use with the files in that directory)
3. The toolchest (why should a menu have to take up the entire width of my screen?)
4. The file selection dialog (being able to click on part of a path and have the file browser jump to that part of the filesystem is nice)
5. The scroll wheel for scaling. (Okay, nautilus has the zoom buttons, but the scroll wheel just feels nicer to me)
6. tagging (This lets me assign an icon to a specific file rather than everything that matches that mime-type)
7.
8. Open directory as different user (ie, I want to grab some files from root's home directory, I can just open a filemanager window as root rather then using xterm+su/sudo/etc)
9. Better remote X user awareness (I can have a desktop configuration for when I log into X locally or from machine y or machine z, etc, etc with no special configuration required, it just works)
10. CPU Eater! (if you don't know what I'm talking about, get on an SGI that has demos.sw.* installed and check out your background options)
`fortune -o`
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.