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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.
MaXX Desktop's site seems to be down.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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You obviously have no idea what IRIX was used for.
Overpriced machines that got replaced by commodity PCs with OpenGL cards. The hardware designers at Silicon Graphic hardware started nVidia to produce OpenGL cards when the market turned away from dedicated graphic machines.
Go back to your 3D games and stop pretending to have a clue.
Fine. I'll do that. My modest nVidia 740 2GB video card could probably run circles around your IRIX.
Ok everyone dicks out. Let's compare two decade old hardware to current generation.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I agree with the anonymous gentleman (of whatever gender) that you don't have a clue. Hardware 3D acceleration was just a tiny part of the reason SGI was popular back in the day, scalability in processors, memory, networking, storage and performance were all very important. And that scalability extended to 3D acceleration too.
Nobody* bought SGI systems to run crude 3D accelerated games.
(* Well some companies did use SGI systems to create VR game machines however the graphics wasn't crude for that time)
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.
I'll be standing in the gorilla-sized line. :P
Hello from the chimpanzee-sized line!
...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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Nobody bought SGI systems to run crude 3D accelerated games.
Someone forgot to tell the folks at ID Software.
http://itrunsdoom.tumblr.com/post/99687965744/sgi-workstations-yeah-they-run-doom-during-the
Doom isn't 3D accelerated and - as pointed out quite explicitly in the link you posted - they did it "for funsies" because Nobody* bought SGI systems to run crude 3D accelerated games.
ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/quake/intro.html
Quake indeed is 3D accelerated but this was again done for fun and not a commercial product because of the quote above.
https://www.geek.com/games/joh...
Not even sure why you think this is at all relevant, perhaps you didn't read it but yes John Carmack once used an SGI monitor.
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.'"
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.
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.