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SGI Desktop Clone Gets A New Version On Fedora (maxxinteractive.com)
Silicon Graphics workstations used the IRIX Interactive Desktop (formerly called Indigo Magic Desktop) for its IRIX operating system (based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions). "Anyone who remembers working on a SGI machine probably has fond memories of the Magic Desktop for IRIX," remembered one Slashdot reader in 2002. At the time a project called 5Dwm was working on a clone, and its work is still being continued by MaXX Interactive. Today Slashdot reader Daniel Mark shared the news that after "several years and many long nights," the company is announcing a new release for Fedora 25, adding that "more Linux Distributions support will be added over the coming days/weeks." They're calling it "something new and fresh in the Linux Desktop space."
The MaXX Desktop is available in two versions, the free Community Edition (CE) which provides basic SGI Desktop experience and the commercially available Professional Edition (PE) that comes with support, CPU and GPU specific optimizations and a full SGI Desktop experience... So there is no surprise here, the MaXX Desktop is a highly tuned Workstation Environment for the Linux x86_64 and ia64 platforms. Multi-core processing, NVidia GPU specific optimizations are among the things that makes the MaXX Desktop so fast, light-weight and stable.
I still fire up my Octane every once and a while and marvel how snappy the UI is. If only the desktop looked as nice as the box itself.
Yes, it's a UNIX and yes, I know this...
Can we move along now?
MaXX Desktop's site seems to be down.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I know this!!!
Our site is down and we are working on it... Strange it happened just after this post ;)
I had fond memories of my 3Dfx Voodoo Rush card in the late 1990's. Once I started playing Quake and Quake 2 in full OpenGL color, my roommates ran out to get Voodoo I/II cards to go with their software-rendering Matrox cards. Of course, 3Dfx was the beginning of the end for Silicon Graphics.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to do molecular modeling on an SGI machine. What was nice was that you could set up a remote desktop GUI on any Linux computer and work from anywhere.
The MaXX Desktop is available in two versions, the free Community Edition (CE) which provides basic SGI Desktop experience and the commercially available Professional Edition (PE) that comes with support, CPU and GPU specific optimizations and a full SGI Desktop experience... So there is no surprise here, the MaXX Desktop is a highly tuned Workstation Environment for the Linux x86_64 and ia64 platforms. Multi-core processing, NVidia GPU specific optimizations are among the things that makes the MaXX Desktop so fast, light-weight and stable.
Apparently the SGI environment isn't the only thing that's backwards with them...
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But are they talking about that ugly desktop environment with italic fonts everywhere and a 1/2" thick border around all the windows? That's really the only thing I remember about working on an SGI workstation...
...any of the associated software.
The hardware? YES. Sheer fscking awesomeness. The software? Really, really crap.
For all the *nix users out there who think we don't have a "Windows ME" in our history - you clearly missing out on 6.x series IRIX, especially in the early days. Crashing like SGI got $1 for everytime it crashed (and boy did SGI need the money from 97 onwards...)
I miss the SGI IR2 that was in my office (they had to put it somewhere and I won the lottery) and would love to have it heating my office today - but the software? LULZ...
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Does it have the red mouse pointers?
Is this the same SGI 3D Desktop featured in Jurassic Park?
interesting Mountain View history note: Google has most of the buildings around the area that used to have the SGI campus.
http://www.topflightspecs.com/projects-silicon-graphics.html
https://urbanland.uli.org/planning-design/open-spaces-and-active-transportation/
some of the old SGI signs are still around in the out of the way parking areas
It irks me that modern systems lack those borders. They help make each window visually distinct.
Circumcision is child abuse.
the comment.
C'mon, everyone knows the front end interface to a SGI machine is fsn, also known for the "it's a Unix system, I know this!" line from Jurassic Park.
What do you use that doesn't allow window borders? It certainly works for me in Xfce.
...any of the associated software.
The hardware? YES. Sheer fscking awesomeness. The software? Really, really crap.
For all the *nix users out there who think we don't have a "Windows ME" in our history - you clearly missing out on 6.x series IRIX, especially in the early days. Crashing like SGI got $1 for everytime it crashed (and boy did SGI need the money from 97 onwards...)
I miss the SGI IR2 that was in my office (they had to put it somewhere and I won the lottery) and would love to have it heating my office today - but the software? LULZ...
Apparently you never used Sco Xenix aka OpenServer later on
http://saveie6.com/
even wikipedia agrees.
as consumer pc's got faster and faster they couldn't keep up. they could not keep up with raw cpu nor with 3d acceleration - and yes having a 3d accelerator earlier than others was a big thing for sgi.
while it might have been on a shopping list for an effects studio in early 90's by late '90s it was out of the shopping list and sgi's fast decline around the turn of the millennium agrees. they could not keep up with speed.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Dual-booting Mint with Cinnamon and Win10. Yeah, I've tried Xfce before, will try other DEs eventually.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I might install this just to scratch the nostalgia-itch... I'm imagining that it is so out-dated, that I will want to go back to KDE after a few minutes.
What's really amusing is all the years that SGI put xhost + in the default X config, especially since virtually everyone was using routable IPs at the time
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
SGI machines ran on Motorola and MIPS cpus. I assume this is an emulation running on Intel hardware.
Just install the Motif Window Manager with a compositor. It uses the same obsolete widget toolkit, is incompatible with modern applications and looks like a big bag of dicks - so you know you are getting the genuine experience!
Plus you get acceleration on nVidia, Radeon and Intel hardware, and don't have to pay a fucking cent for the privilege.
Not to mention all the default unpassworded accounts that IRIX came with...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Now I'm no Linux expert but wouldn't that basically let ANYONE attempt a remote X session. Now sure, they'd still have to local credentials to actually do so, but anyone could try.
Now admittedly there are circumstances one might want to do that, say if one knew they were going to need/want to remote in but didn't know what IP they might have. Of course in that case one would probably have key based auth set up and set the machine to basically ignore any user/password attempts.
Now I'm no Linux expert but wouldn't that basically let ANYONE attempt a remote X session. Now sure, they'd still have to local credentials to actually do so, but anyone could try.
It's actually worse than that. You don't need credentials. You just DISPLAY=hostname:0 executable and bingo! You're connected to the X server. At which point you can log the user's keystrokes or whatever. dougmc kindly showed me the error of my ways when I connected an Indigo R3000 running IRIX 5.3 to Tivoli's network via ISDN when we were both working on-call support there. Ahh, those were the days, when ISDN was a reasonably fast connection.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The vision and direction of where we want to take MaXX Desktop is fresh and new! And no we do not plan to make another Linux desktop, but something smart, useful for people and not over bloated!
So this version is the foundation of what's to come... A modern look and feel, desktop360, full vector interfaces, VR building, and much more. Feel free to visit us maxxinteractive.com or on Facebook for more details of what to come.
Thanks!
I remember my little Indy box. Had video conferencing and a nice interface. All the stuff Windows and Mac people think they invented first. Way ahead of its time. Too bad SGI screwed with the OS. We dumped them because it became impossible to get even simple stuff, like ping to compile without a hassle. Perl was a real chore.
Wouldn't mind trying the new desktop out.
I learned UNIX, Motif, and "gl" (the precursor to OpenGL) on a purple Indigo 3000 in 1993. A year later I got the teal Indigo 2 and then they rolled out the Indigo Magic desktop. I shipped the first commercial application (called Elastic Reality) that was fully Indigo Magic style compliant. At the next SGI dev conference the IM folks gave me a cool (at the time) purple Indigo Magic jacket. It was quite the honor! I remember very fondly my days of working on the Indigo, Indigo 2, OCTANE, and eventually an Infinite Reality. It was quite the shame when I had an I2, OCTANE, and O2 in my basement that were essentially worthless. I gave them away.
I learned UNIX, Motif, and "gl" (the precursor to OpenGL) on a purple Indigo 3000 in 1993. A year later I got the teal Indigo 2 and then they rolled out the Indigo Magic desktop. I shipped the first commercial application (called Elastic Reality) that was fully Indigo Magic style compliant. At the next SGI dev conference the IM folks gave me a cool (at the time) purple Indigo Magic jacket. It was quite the honor! I remember very fondly my days of working on the Indigo, Indigo 2, OCTANE, and eventually an Infinite Reality. It was quite the shame when I had an I2, OCTANE, and O2 in my basement that were essentially worthless. I gave them away.
(sorry this is a duplicate - I posted this before accidentally as an AC)
I used SGIs for three years in grad school, and for another 6 or 7 professionally in a television graphics production environment. My first workstation was actually a rebranded system... something-85, I forget. From there we got a whole lab of Indy workstations, I got an O2 as my desktop; we also had a Crimson, which was the one we could do video-lan programming on to allow us to output to tape one frame at a time.
Even on that first system (the one whose model escapes me, but it was before they gave the systems names), I marveled at how my personal PC, a 386 with a math co-processor and the same amount of RAM as my school SGI was just a complete dog by comparison. I didn't do any specific testing, but I did compile and run some of the same basic non-graphics C programs that I was writing for classes, and there was simply no comparison - the SGI was dozens of times faster, at least, and that's non-graphics programs.
Still, while I marveled at the hardware and how amazing IrisGL was (their closed implementation before OpenGL), I never thought the UI itself was particularly great. Better than my DOS running PC at the time, for sure, but nothing special compared to the Suns or the plain X11 stuff we had hosted on our Convex. I look at the screenshots on the page linked to in the article (yes, they are working as I write this), and am really not impressed. There may be some cool graphics optimizations that, if I thought I needed them, might be interesting... but on the whole, like most SGI (yes, we used them back when it was SGI Inc, not sgi), I have fond memories - but we've moved so far beyond that style desktop that it's silly to think about going back. Seems like one of those "in my day something was better!" moments.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Can we move along now?
Only if you don't remotely lock all the doors!
Ezekiel 23:20
Ahh... responding to my own post. How sad. It was a 4D85. It wasn't rebranded, just not a case you'd expect from SGI. Also wanted to point out my 386 was overclocked to 40Mhz, and my 4D85 was 16Mhz... and still blew away the PC handily.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It seems this is a binary only release. Or did I miss something?
Interesting. I recall a friend using a MIPS R3000-based SGI (maybe an Indigo?) running at 33MHz, the same as my 486. When he and I compiled the same program, they ended up being similar speeds. Certainly one wasn't twice as fast as the other, although this would have been a program that only did integer math.
dom
Is it now. Subjects on comments are a really stupid thing. Do you put subjects on your text messages and skype chat messages?
...helmet.
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Maybe an IRIX desktop clone may bribe me to use Linux on 2020. Still we need real apps for documents and printed images.
The 4D85 was, AFAIR, 16Mhz, and my 386 clone was overclocked to 40Mhz... the SGI was many times faster. It could have been my crap code somehow being optimized better by the SGI compiler over Turbo C, I don't know.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
(might have been 5.1, that was a while back and who cares, but this is slashdot after all)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...be new here.