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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 06 2017, @01:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the time-before-there-was-AGP dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:00AM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:00AM (#521703)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:36PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:36PM (#521882) Journal

    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.