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Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.
Silicon Graphics (SGI) had a crack at the workstation business in the early 1990s, when it dominated the then-rather-limited world of computer graphics and decided it would try to parlay that experience into the CAD and desktop publishing markets. Apple's early Macintoshes led those market, but their 68xxx CPUs had obvious limits. SGI threw MIPS silicon at the problem, brought IRIX out of servers onto the desktop and cooked up a nice windowing system to match the Mac and hit the market.
SGI did okay for a while but proprietary workstations became an oddity once Windows came along and Microsoft encouraged makers of graphics-centric apps to bring their wares to Win32. SGI added a Wintel workstation line, but then had to compete with PCs-at-scale outfits like Compaq and Dell. The company kept making MIPS-powered workstation well into the 2000s, but eventually succumbed.
Masson has tried to bring back some of that heritage in the form of the Maxx Interactive Desktop, which aims to offer "an evolution of SGI's IRIX Interactive Desktop."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:09PM (13 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:13PM (1 child)
If you knew anything at all, you'd be using xmonad [xmonad.org], and learning Haskell [haskell.org] just to write your config program.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:27PM
DWM is nearly as hard-core:
-- http://dwm.suckless.org/ [suckless.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:24PM (6 children)
I'm unsure whether you're saying it's a clone, but what I read on one of the project's pages says it's based on SGI's code:
-- http://5dwm.org/licensing/ [5dwm.org]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday June 06 2017, @05:14PM (5 children)
Yea, that was when I lost interest, the license. Restrictions on use are unacceptable. Which means it can't be packaged and put into repos so it will never be used. Period, full stop.
I'm guessing this guy is maintaining this for a couple of diehard customers in Hollywood. Maybe one of the charnel houses that passes the husk of SGI around will remove the restrictions and allow it to have a chance, but even then I wouldn't bet much on it making a breakout.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:37AM (4 children)
The licence gives permission to modify and redistribute, in both source and binary form. A notable restriction (which I had mentioned in a separate comment) is that it's only allowed to be used on certain architectures. However, it could be added to a repo or packaged, if anyone could get a copy in the first place. The article says "we can't offer a download link" nor did I find one.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:54AM (1 child)
None of the mainstream distros would accept a package with that sort of use restriction because they all now tend to have ARM ports. So even if somebody gets the sources it will be an obscure personal repo. Dead end. As I said, I wouldn't put money on it ever achieving >1% desktop Linux usage, even if it were DFSG compatible. Being banished to oblivion only makes it worse.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:44PM
It later dawned on me that the word "Linux" is also a restriction.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:00AM (1 child)
Hmm, something in what you said didn't make sense instantly. When I looked earlier there were download links for Fedora and Debian binaries and no source apparent. Those are now gone and a link to a source repo is there instead. What did you see? Apparently the site is undergoing rapid change.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:36PM
I was mistaken. I had looked at:
http://dev.maxxdesktop.com/trac/maxxdesktop [maxxdesktop.com] (gives me an error page)
https://sourceforge.net/projects/maxxdesktop/ [sourceforge.net] (no downloads)
http://maxxdesktop.co/ [maxxdesktop.co] (parking page linked from Sourceforge)
I confused those with the link from the article, which did lead me (just now) to http://maxxinteractive.com/downloads/ [maxxinteractive.com] which is an index page. There's an installation script for Fedora, dated 1 June and some other files with recent time-stamps. From the file-names it looks like it's binaries and architecture-independent files.
When I poked around the project's SVN-to-Web pages, it looked as though there was an initial import 8 years ago, a little bit of clean-up around that time, and no changes after that.
http://dev.maxxinteractive.com/trax/maxxdesktop/browser [maxxinteractive.com]
Among the sources there I didn't find those for the window manager. Among the downloads most of the files for the DR3 release and earlier releases are dated November 2009, so I would guess that what's in the SVN may correspond to DR3. It looks as though the maintainer changed hosting in 2009 and the project was inactive from then until this 31 May/1 June.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fishybell on Tuesday June 06 2017, @03:19PM (3 children)
I'll give you my FVWM [wikipedia.org] when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
In all seriousness though, it's amazing how tied to a particular desktop people will get, and then wonder why people are unwilling to leave behind their Mac or Windows. A million choices is what makes Linux, etc. both great and horrible.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:47AM
When I was college in the 90's there was a bank of IRIX machines in the computer lab. I used them a little, but I preferred the SPARCstations where I had installed fvwm along with TkDesk. Does anybody remember TkDesk?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:18AM (1 child)
And worse - my favourite MS Windows UI is the 3.1 one. Possibly because it had the best file manager ever. It just managed files, and wasn't a browser or a control panel.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:44AM
Funny story, I still use FVWM when I get bored of KDE. Or vice-versa. Did you know that it is currently being reworked? With a possibility of new config format? I know!