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SGI releases "Jessie" to the Open Source
SGI has released "Jessie" to the Open Source World. Jessie is an IDE for use on top of current development tools in the Linux OS. Here is a screenshot of Jessie. Note: The page is a bit outdated (it doesn't mention that there are some IDE for Linux such as CodeWarrior of CodeFusion). Thanks for Linux Today for the story.
I agree 100%. I installed a TrueType font server and my display looks so much better. I finally found something good on a microsoft CD. The fonts.
There is a how to on doing it but I don't have it on me. I have it written down at home. You want me to send it to you send me some email and I'll do it. My email address in the header is valid.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Right - interesting.
On first sight it looked to me to be very similar to cvd. I have to say that that is the best debugger I've ever used - I do sort of real time work ( haptics 1KHz updates ) and it worked really well and the GL stuff was neat. Also, you could use emacs near it reasonably well which was cool.
It seems to show what a great company you guys are , ( oh shit I'm crawling ) and I just hope the new name is not SGI for soon going insolvent.
I use xemacs, but I can't really claim to understand it. I know how to do the basics, but all the help seems to rely on the user knowing the right questions to ask the help system.
In a previous article I asked about the resources available to allow someone new to get a handle on the Mozilla code. In this thread I have a related question:
Are there any references that give a fairly straight line "here's everything that's useful" introduction to using xemacs (or emacs, I don't really know the difference) to productively work on a large C++ project such as Mozilla? Something that points out all the features that will make working on a large project manageable?
I've stumbled onto a few useful features, but I'm sure there are other features buried in the ridiculous cascade of menus that I'll never discover unless someone points them out.
I think part of the reason that IDEs get so much more attention than emacs is that if you don't have 5+ years of experience using emacs you probably aren't aware of enough of the features to make emacs do what an IDE does out of the box.
The advantage that an IDE has is that with its much smaller (more focused) feature set it can have a tutorial that gets you productive right away. The emacs tutorial (last time I checked) wastes your time telling you how to move your cursor even though nearly every keyboard produced in the last 5 years has had perfectly good arrow, page up&down, and home&end buttons.
At the top of the source tree:
/absolute/path -name '*.[cChH]' -print | etags -
find
For OO browsing, have a look at the OOBrowser for GNU Emacs and XEmacs.
I've been wondering about this myself. (Although personally I'm interested in using with KDevelop).
Maybe it could also be given a Corba OpenParts and/or Corba Baboon wrapper. I've thought of doing an OpenParts wrapper for XEmacs myself, but I've never gotten around to it (haven't looked into it to see if it's feasable).
Of course a Qt or Gtk+ implementation of Emacs would also be nice, but a lot more work.
---------------------------
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
Did I say GPL? No. I just said it was another license that I have to take time to read and figure out its interactions with other licenses...
read the essay I linked to. BSD is fine, X11 is fine, Artistic is fine. Whatever. But don't go off making up new licenses just because you can.
Yes, I was using FrameMaker on a Sun, and was suddenly surprised to notice that I was using Emacs keys to move around, and that they worked! Didn't see anything in the documentation about this, but I found that quite a few of the Emacs combinations worked as well. Unfortunately, the Windows version of FM doesn't seem to have this feature.
I hear about this all the time, and I'm really curious as to what it looks like. Are there screenshots of this wm posted anywhere?
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
I couldn't resist. I took a shot of my desktop - Irix 6.2 on an Indigo2. I'll get around to upgrading to Irix 6.5 soon...
:)
http://www.tomandian.com/tmp/scrn.gif
Enjoy
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Analysis of gprof? It sounds that this is worth looking at after all. Reading gprof output is a completely pain.
Don't know what SpeedShop is. Can they be used on Linux or are they SGI specific?
For instance, you have external timing information that is being collected by running another process. If the times being become unacceptable (i.e. things are taking too long), you can send a message saying "stop everything" and then you can use the debugger functionality to poke around and see what is going on.
You can also have multiple debugging sessions going on at one time in a single jessie window. Thus, you can watch the different processes simultaneously. In fact, come to think of it, your new panel could attach to some offending process and bring it under debugger control, automagically.
The XFree86 Font Deuglification Mini HOW-TO is a must read for anyone using XFree. Get it set up today and say good by to ugly fonts in X!
You know what if I were you I'd demand my money back! Jeesh! Having to configure something in Linux? Unheard of!
The best fonts in the Unix world are, unsurprisingly, on SGI machines. You can pick up a used Indigo2 for pretty cheap nowadays, and use it as a front-end for your Linux systems. That's what I did, and I'm happy as a clam.
:-(.
l
I just wish people wouldn't keep on using Helvetica on their web pages - that's the only bad SGI font
The Enlightenment window manager comes with some nice readable fonts - you might want to try that too.
D
My document on buying a used SGI machine:
http://www.amazing.com/internet/old-sgi-faq.htm
----
I've written code for Windows much more than for Linux recently... and that looks very familiar.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I'm not talking about those weirdo 3000 font CDs. 2998 of those are crap.
Well, not all of them are bad. The one I have actually has a couple of dozen good ones for general purposes and a whole bunch of decorative fonts that while not good for general purpose uses, are useful for signs, wedding/party invitations, flyers, etc. But you do have to watch out, because not all of the cheap font CDs are good, especially the ones that are Windows TrueType only. I've found the ones that have both Postscript and TrueType and are set up for both PC and Mac seem to be better on average.
All I want is a good helvetica, courier new and arial.
Frankly, I think arial sucks. It looks like a bad, low budget clone of Helvetica. I don't see any advantages of 'courier new' over plain old courier. My solution is generally to just make links from 'courier new' pointing to my regular courier and from 'arial' to my helvetica.
That's it. And why the heck should I have to install a true type font server?
Actually some of the newer distributions include one these days, so you may not have to do much to set one up.
Can't everyone see that the default fonts are ugly?
They aren't that bad for most purposes... I don't think most people care that much.
Just build it in!
Get someone to contribute some fonts you like as freeware and I'm sure the distros would be glad to include them.
I have found that Code Crusader is a good IDE. It's easy to use and GPL'd.
I was REALLY disappointed in what I saw and read about Jesse! This CAN'T be what SGI develops in, can it?
Quicker
DDD is nice. A bit on the slow side but quite nice. It is lacking in area of integration with another tools ( or maybe it is my problem of not knowing how to set it up properly).
DDD can be integrated with a couple of editors ((X)Emacs is one). But the author strongly advices against it. And I do too, since you will lose the tooltips when hoovering above a variable.
OK, I read the essay. But I still disagree with your position. I don't think that the proliferation of licenses is a problem. Everybody should be free to roll their own free software license to customize it to their particular situation, business model, etc. What we really should be pushing for is short, simple licenses (that are easy to interpret), not pushing everybody to adopt the GPL or other non-optimal free software license.
Hmmn, I'm a bit surprised at the complaints from the people in this forum. Where's the spirit of free software? Instead of saying things like, "this is just a front end to gdb", or it lacks "X widget" and "Y widget", we should be saying to ourselves, "Wow, this is a great idea, I wish it had this feature, so I'm going to try and code it and submit a patch!" Then someone else contributes another patch, and soon we've got a super IDE.
I mean, isn't that how Linux happened? Isn't that the spirit of free software. If you're going to post something like, "Why doesn't Jessie have this feature" replace the word Jessie with "Linux Kernel" and you probably won't be wanting to post that message, but you'll want to get coding!
Thanks for the free software gift SGI, much appreciated. Looking forward to the release of XFS
No, we should be pushing people to use software licenses which permit free redistribution instead of licenses which do not (GPL, LGPL).
Xemacs (at least, maybe emacs too) also has a tool called speedbar. When you first start it, it looks like a simple directory browser, but if you click on a source file, it'll expand that part of the tree view into all of the tags inside the file. It even runs etags for you. Works for several languages too.
Probably not very useful for cross referencing, but pretty decent for source browsing if your directory structure is organized.
A bit unfair making such a strong assertion without even trying the software,no?
If SGI have a good debugger, maybe they know what they're doing.
Cheers!
I think we shold use licenses that works, GPL works better than the other... GNU/Linux is the example of what GPL can do;)
Speedshop is the performance analysis tool that SGI has on their Irix systems. We are porting it to Linux (and IA32/64 systems), but the effort is moving slowly. We are considering open sourcing SpeedShop. Internally, we consider SpeedShop to be a very powerful performance analysis tool. It has significantly more functionality than gprof and we have received good reviews from our customers. -Bill
The first comment is a bit mean spirited.
SGI are doing GOOD things and choice == freedom.
I agree that the 4DWm is quite good. I'm perfectly happy using it. However, on my main SGI at work I run Windowmaker. 'My' other SGI's use 4DWm though.
:-)
In my opinion, people sometimes mix up 4DWm (the window manager) with the 'magic' desktop. SGI's desktop environment is quite extensive and 4DWm is just one component of it.
My (tiny) problem with 4DWm is that it's a little too Motif-like for my taste. Lucky there are lots of window managers around now
If there were no copyright problems (surely not?), then there's little reason *not* to open-source 4DWm.
Thus, appearing simple and unassuming, may (and I emphasize 'may') lead one to believe that there is nothing interesting underneath the hood and is thus 'lame'. I can assure you that there is plenty under the hood that doesn't exist in any other linux IDE and there is more yet to come.
I've used some of the command-line SpeedShop tools (ssrun/prof and ssusage) on our Origin, and they are quite nice. The way you can do profiling without having to recompile an instrumented version of your code is slick.
What I would kill for, OTOH, is a version of perfex that runs under Linux. (Perfex gives you access to the CPUs' hardware performance counters, so you can directly measure things like MFLOPS and cache miss rates -- it's the bomb for doing performance tuning and optimization of scientific codes.) The various Linux performance counter drivers are almost to the point where you could port perfex to use them; I just wish the developers would come to a consenus on which one would go in the mainstream kernel. (Hint, hint.)
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
I really like SGI. They really are very helpful to the Linux community. They have now released two great things to Open Source and they have such a respected name that they are adding credibility to the whole movement. I hope they keep up the good work!
Then why don't you use TrueType fonts. You need to install a TrueType font server, xfstt is one.
actually i found better font support in macOS
than windows, but i didnt really play much with
with fonts in either (except in photoshop and
illustrator). i kinda remember NExTsTeP (i dont
remember the correct capitalization) having nice
looking fonts too.
anyway nexus looks nice, though you have to fiddle
with emacs (give it the entire font string,
xfontsel can be a good help with this) and there
are a few other nice looking fonts...
methinks part of the problem is in the rendering
and there also the fact there is no good front
end to installing fonts in X (that i know of).
too bad mkfontdir does not work with postscript
or true type fonts. fonts are still a mess in X.
anyone know if this will be better in XF86 4.0?
the only times i think the fonts look bad are with
style sheets enabled in netscape and a few other
cases where the font rendering is clearly not anti
aliased.
Emacs may not be as pretty, but I haven't seen an IDE yet that can come even close to touching it.
i just downloaded it, the page and the FTP site
state clearly that the code is under the GPL!
im willing to look, but it better be pretty good
for me to switch from xemacs...
You really do base your choice of OS on the ___important stuff___.
Perhaps you should try a Mac, they have even more excellent font rendering.
While on this subject, has anyone got used the xemacs widget for much? I keep thinking that if it had a GTK+ wrapper, and it plugged in with glade or gIDE or something it would be pretty much unstoppable.
Agreed. I don't understand the appeal of IDEs such
:-) (though Swing presents a bit of a difficulty, i guess)
as this --
it lacks scriptability, extensibility, support for languages other than those debugged by gdb (Emacs supports Perl, Haskell, and Smalltalk, just to name those that I work with) and requires Java. No way I'm gonna install that huge JDK (or even JRE) for just this....
OTOH, the profiler is pretty. Maybe it can be broken out and used separately.... compiled with gcj, it might even be fast enough to be usable.
I think the tape player metaphor evidenced in the screenshot is a nice idea. I also like the keyword highlighting. The article says it's in Java. Does that mean I have to run it in my web browser? Or am I just being ignorant?
The blurb said something about CodeWarrior. I used the Windoze version of it and the "project" interface is horrible. I think I'll try SGI's IDE.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
Perl, Haskell and Smalltalk is nothing. Emacs has
special support for TeX, makefiles, java,
lisp, scheme, Eiffel, Sather, C, C++, Shell script and probably a lot of other stuff too.
It's a bit of a cliche I know, but why would I give up emacs for this? Don't get me wrong, I like the fancy graphics but I'm not going to give up the whole host of emacs lisp code for pretty buttons - things like editing modes for every language under the sun, nice integration with gdb, customisable colour highlighting, integration with make and grep, and total customisability. They'd be better off spending their time adding fancy buttons to emacs than writing yet another lame IDE.
emacs (and xemacs) is the best in my opinion as well, but it is missing a couple things, and
integrated source browser (and for OO people
a class browser) so users can do things like take a struct and see where its defined and/or
where its used, class heirarchys etc...
it could save alot of time greping when
you have to fix clients huge messy source trees.
of course there probably is already elisp out
there that does this...
i know cygnus sells a source browser but i dont know if it integrates with emacs or if its under
GPL (i was under the impression that everything
they did was GPL but i could not find the source
for download on thier web site)
Well yes. I mean if it drives you to distraction it's important. Kinda like how a Linux fan might be distracted by Windows crashing. See?
there is a serious gap in the linux development
thats IDE
yes you can moan on about emacs and vi
and yes I use them
lets think project managment if you have ever been on a large project it is impossible to co-ordinate everybody without cutting down a small forest !
this was solved by useing tools
yes debuggers help and if anyone says they dont they have never written a large project in a small time frame !
IDE help they take some of the pain out of useing lots of differant tools that dont play well togther in the same sandpit
what we (linux) needs is project management tools and before anyone moans that they dont work everything can be abused hell I can write bad cobol, bad java, bad c and bad C++ (not to hard) but I dont because I know the conventions and their limertations when working with Booch or UML you have to know their flaws (UML has lots) but they ARE useful
SGI has tryed to address what they see as a gap WELL DONE SGI
whats more they have made it look the same under GNOME and KDE (although the screen shot is GNOME)
thank you
(for reading what is my most sensible post)
john jones
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
Now, I must say I'm a bit disapointed on this one... I just tried it, and it does nothing more than xxgdb (X front-end to gdb). Jessie is also just that: a graphical front-end to xxgdb. O.K., it looks a tad nicer, but it's also slower and buggy.
Needless to say, SGI's effort is appreciated. In the end, Jessie might end up being a full-featured FREE IDE, which Linux is lacking right now. CodeWarrior still is kick-ass, but many people (read "student") can't afford it.
The Mac is a nice machine. I always regretted needing to switch from the Mac to Win95. Of course it's a bit programmer-hostile, but again, nothing compared to Windows. I always recommend the Mac to non-techno folk. It's much easier to use than anything else I've encountered. It's not easier to program, but that's really not the same issue. Different target audience. We hope to someday make Linux as friendly to tyro's as the Mac is, but we've a long way to go.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Now if they would just release the source code for their window manager, that would make me happy.
I keep an old indigo(irix 5.3) on my desk and find that I use it mostly for an xterm and management station.
b
b
I agree. It looks like SGI is really committed to the Open Source model.
I've just bought some SGI stock to add to my Linux portfolio (go RHAT!!).
It's a bargain now that the Micros~1 investors have bailed out....
Dont get me wrong, having a graphical debugger is nice. But when they say "IDE" I think of more than just a debugger. I also think project manager and editor, at the very least.
I haven't downloaded, not looking forward to trying to get java running on my machine. CodeCrusader is working fine for me for now.
You must not know what you are doing if you can not make the fonts look nice in X.
Ahem. BeOS.
But many licenses work better than the GPL.
FreeBSD, Apache, X Windows, SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, DEC UNIX, NeXT, IRIX, Unicos/mk, Mach, and dozens of others are examples of what free redistribution can give you. You should really know what you talk about before you post.
I challenge you to find a modern Unix which does not contain a line of BSD code. Even your precious Linux has a few files with BSD copyrights at the top...
If fonts are that important to you, get a Postscript and/or TrueType font server installed in your X environment, and then buy one of those '3000 fonts' CD packages... I had a couple of those sets left over from stuff I was doing on a Mac (but they are multi-platform format CDs) a couple of years ago, and they work fine with Linux, including printing to my non-Postscript laser printers using Ghostscript.
I want SGI to release CVD for Linux. I use CVD on a daily basis at work, and think its the best debugger I've ever seen. I would be really happy if CVD was released for Linux even if I had to pay for it.
Anybody know if SGI plans to do this in the future?
-- toolie
I believe there is something in emacs than can "take a struct and see where its defined". I think it's called xtags or something, but I've never bothered to investigate.
As for a true source browser, they don't impress me that much and those that I've seen have been pretty lame, especially the IDE integrated ones. But if you really want one they are probably extremely language specific (at least they are if they are going to be of any damned use). I don't want to have to learn a whole lot of new keystrokes and editing commands just because I'm using a different language.
Moral of the story: If you have a good source browser INTEGRATE IT WITH EXISTING EDITORS.
It's probably cvd, unless dbx is your idea of "a very good debugger".
I'm not talking about those weirdo 3000 font CDs. 2998 of those are crap. All I want is a good helvetica, courier new and arial. That's it. And why the heck should I have to install a true type font server? Can't everyone see that the default fonts are ugly? Just build it in!
Very good stuff. Looks much better than the simple screenshot from SGI.
The point is you shouldn't have to do anything other than get X up and running.
integrated source browser (and for OO people a class browser) so users can do things like take a struct and see where its defined and/or where its used, class heirarchys etc...
Actually the emacs Ada-mode has a nice xref thing going. It's really useful.
- Aidan
I think this screenshot looks so bad because its jpeg compressed. The text itself is fine.
As for windows fonts being better, I cant find a SINGLE windows font that does nice looking monospace text ala the linux terminal.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Hey dudes, this is not an IDE, it's a front end to gdb. Like DDD. Seesh, who ever submitted this article should have looked at the pic and read the rest of the stuff. Lamess is not an excuse.
I agree, that is a very nice feature of CVD, thus I have added scrollbar marking to the projects lists in the "How to Contribute Section".
People like you with the "if it isn't GPL it isn't free" attitude really piss me off. Please understand, THE GPL IS NOT THE ONLY FREE SOFTWARE LICENSE!!! It's merely an example of one written to promote specific interests that not every developer should be expected to share. In many ways, the GPL isn't very free at all (as compared to the BSD license for example).
You can always download the GNU Emacs manual. I got it in dvi format and printed the entire three hundred or so pages. You may think it's a waste of paper and toner, but it's much easier to find stuff there than in the help system. I use it A LOT.
Yes, it was cvd that I used.
It also showed the breakpoints as a read line in the scrollbar-area. Very nice, haven't seen it in another debugger.
> of course there probably is already elisp out there that does this...
/source/of/project -type f | grep \.[cCh]+p*$`
Of course there is. It's called etags. You run the program like this:
etags `find
You unfortunately have to do this for each directory, though i suspect that you can define things out to use just one etags file. Then you just hit meta-. when the cursor is over a struct, variable, function, etc. and it brings you right to the definition, opening up all necessary files. Add in hooks to saving files in cc-mode, and you can auto-update your tags file when you save. I do this and it's so fast I don't even notice it happening (Admittedly, I'm on a 633 MHz Alpha, but even so, it is fast in and of itself). I highly recommend it. That and building with make in your xemacs window so that you can just middle click on a compile error and be brought to it, and you've got a large part of an IDE right there.
Remember the Mantra: "Emacs can do everything."
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
Install the Adobe Acrobat Reader, and configure X to use the fonts that come with it. Do the same for GhostScript.
After I did that, the printing quality did improve a lot... You don't know the difference a good font makes until you see it.
It's on the Altrasoft website. :-) of languages.
A pretty complete Smalltalk-like browser complete with graphical tree display. Supports a small slew
I think it's XEmacs only.
You might be interested in Infodoc and the OO-Browser, . It's sort of an [X]Emacs ++. (ajjfk)