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.

Comments

Re:Nobody who worked on SGI machines misses IRIX o

[drinkypoo]

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.