Little known fact is that the SGI 5.6+ (certainly 6) settings controls was the first "electron app".
It ran a mozilla process, with CSS1.x to style the controls like Motif. And the Javascript code interacted with the underlying XUL hacks in a manner not much different from WebOS palm used decades later.
When I worked at HP in the mid 80s I met the guys there that developed the UI design of CDE. Ironically done on Macintosh IIs using Pixelpaint. It was a very nice design.
It was but VUE was way nicer. CDE was boring and businesslike, neutered by the suits from IBM.
Solarized Dark keeps CDE alive for me, sortof.
Did they update dtksh with Korn's final ksh93 release?
While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.
The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
Vaguely related, I saw an extremely nice little bit of UI on a MRI machine console the other day. When planning a sequence of scans, you drag them into a listbox. But once that listbox is "full" from top to bottom, it's hard to append to the end (rather than inserting between two existing scans), because you keep having to hit that tiny 1px wide target between the bottom of the box and the last entry.
So someone at Bruker noticed this, and made a drop target UNDER the listbox that's labeled Drop Here to Append. It makes things SO much more pleasant.
these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
Something similar exists in macOS, but isn't widely used, as far as I can tell.
You can create a script in Automator that does things with an input file, and then save it as a desktop icon that you can drop things onto. I have a few of these for auto-resizing images.
(Bonus: Because it's done in Automator, you can also have the same script appear under Quick Actions when you Option-click the file/s.)
Panic's Transmit allows you to create a desktop icon that sends whatever's dropped on it to a server via FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive, or a dozen other methods.
Had great scrollbars. When dragged there would be a shadow to show where the bar was. So you could go back if needed. Also the first platform I noticed that you could middle click the scrollbar to move directly, or control click the titlebar to lower. Though those conventions may have been from Motif?
It listed wm hot keys on the window menu and had vector icons. Yes, believe it was the best desktop of the era.
Would like to see an improved version of it, not merely a faithful reproduction. I hesitate to say modern because it often means dumbed-down. But made for higher resolution would be great.
The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
These comments are what I pay internet for.
How did we have this at one point but now we have gnome and it’s single threaded
, bad extensions take down the whole session desktop manager?
gnome was hijacked long ago to undermine linux adoption. I will not elaborate any further.
They killed galleon in Gnome 2, which was the best browser of its era, replacing it with epiphany. iBM was behind it. Ever since then there has been a lack of innovation on Linux with web browsers and since konqueror is a former shell of itself, killed file manager innovation as well
That explains why they made tray icons so hard to work with. It sounds like a conspiracy theory but I buy it
[deleted]
This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in the day.
I'm curious how you mean? I'm mainly on PopOs nowadays, and it seems largely fine? What are the main annoyances?
Rounded corners and huge paddings
I'll take filled rounded corners over the window border bulge atrocity seen in IRIX.
Also keep in mind IRIX (and most classic desktops) assumed 72 DPI displays rather than 96 DPI displays. That means when you view a screenshot or render them unadjusted they look 75% the size they did back in the day. Still plenty denser in many ways... just not as much as loading it up on a modern "96 DPI is 100%" screen would imply.
I miss real window borders that you could see and drag—what a concept.
This. The very reason I use KDE (I have tried tiling wm's, and they are horrible if I use my drawing tablet, which I use a LOT), then customize it in a way to minimize wasted space (taskbar on the left, take out window borders padding, etc).
Then I go and enable compact look on firefox, take out a bunch of useless icons for things I don't use, and bam my 4K screen is able to accommodate all my work. Even though I do still use 125% DPI scale, not via KDE mind you, because I love eyes.
And even then, it still looks slick and modern.
It's crazy how much space we waste with flat design on desktop. Crazyyy.
Out of curiosity, what was the showstopper on dwm?
I tend to have one hand holding a pen on a drawing tablet. I could customise any wm to be controlled with just the left side of the keyboard obviously but I fear I would have arthritis from doing that.
I'm half joking, I did use i3 for a few years, and have tried many others (bspwm comes to mind). But currently it makes no sense to use keyboard centric wms of any kind.
> dwm is customized through editing its source code
Sounds scary but it's giving you some compile-time guarantees about correctness.
StumpWM and XMonad do the same and they are quite easy to use, especially the former.
They also lead to very space-efficient setups. Windows can be tightly packed.
StumpWM is in a special position here as "compile-time" on Common Lisp is roughly the same thing as "runtime".
Sure, my statement referred to dwm, and it also applies to XMonad.
The only compile time guarantee you'd have by making changes is that it would run, not it being correct nor functional.
Static types do provide some guarantees as they rule out an entire class of runtime errors. In case of XMonad, since Haskell's type system is more expressive, the class of runtime errors ruled out at compile-time is broader.
OpenLook would like to have a word about those corners…
(But yes, in general it's all custom "cards" and list views. HTML didn't allow a good set of GUI widgets, so people adapted, and now the cruel circle has closed with desktop UIs being "informed" by web and mobile views)
Funny, I'll have to look when back at a computer in a few days. I don't recall the padding being that bad. Granted... I do largely use it as an emacs machine. I'm sure that colors what I notice.
Well, they didn't serve you ads on the start menu...
They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
FlexLM dev tools were supplied as part of the operating system distribution.
One could make a simple app to parse, check in, out, licenses and work from there.
Sure beats breaking out the low level tools!
Indy sound is great! I agree and had one playing music for years.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
Man that thing is loud
In addition to bumping it to 4GB, the only upgrade I did was for the HDD. I'm not sure if mine has a quieter PSU, but it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be louder than any other PC when running.
900MHz, 4GB and a DCD V12. Need to fix the PSU, but I love the Big Red look. And hey, it's quieter than a Tezro.
I forgot I also have a V12, but no DCD. I also have a sound card, but its mot connected (my old PSU gave me problems as it died)
I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The Photo Gallery [1] features a couple of installations, running on 4k screen hardware and a Xeon X5690 as it seems, but is still based on CentOS from 2004 and running a Linux 4.18 kernel?
Do they have compilation problems or kernel mod problems, or that they need to port their display server and kernel mods to newer APIs in the upstream kernel?
Looking at the roadmap [2] this looks like a major development effort with huge stories along the way. Is there a foundation people can support financially?
> I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The project seems to be sleeping. The development was veeery slow. It was not open source so, in the end, CDE is the way to go if you need something like this.
The file manager in this looks a lot like my beloved ROX-Filer. Would love to try this if I could install it on FreeBSD. I don't see it in a cursory glance at Ports.
It is indeed ROX, at least it was in the 2020 release.
Sadly this is closed source and only amd64 Linux binaries are available..
FreeBSD support is listed on the site as a goal/feature (I've no idea which one), but I've no idea whether its aspirational or not:
> To run on multiple OS: Linux, FreeBSD and Windows11 WSL2.
The actual installation instructions seem to be for Linux kernels sadly.
I'm curious how projects like this have been impacted by the Wayland work?
In ten years maybe we'll know.
Short answer: dead
Man, I sure hope this project can get traction.
The Indigo Magic Desktop coupled with the 4DWM X window manager was among the top computing experiences I've had! At my peak, I was a sysadmin for our setup where I worked and as a reseller, was basically a remote sysadmin for a fair number of other installations.
Used to keep lists of Free Juno numbers while traveling just so I could get online in the days before fairly ubiquitous free or low cost wi-fi. Dial up on those was what? 2.5kbytes per sec, or thereabouts.
Plenty for that kind of support work, but I digress!
I loved it. The red pointer, which I continue to use to this day, crisp interactions, launch/event sounds, drop pads, and too many other niceties to list here, made for great experiences.
And IRIX itself was no joke. The scheduler is amazing! It remained responsive in almost all scenarios.
Once, for a training class, I had updated the software revision. But, on one machine I had left the app open with some action pending.
I saw one student appearing to run the old revision, which I thought impossible because those files were gone! Well, IRIX cached the whole damn thing. gr_osview showed a huge file cache, which I saw evaporate once the app was closed all the way.
Then things were just fine. Excellent!
And the tools. How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
Want to remote display a high end CAD package with 3D rendering and the works? 4DWM with the GLX extensions handled it nicely.
....
Anyhow, I hope this gets some momentum. I would love to run it and maybe show it off to some younger users in the building what computing was like.
> How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
The CD Player in BeOS could save all or parts of CD Tracks. Also, BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files, I can't remember which. There was also some optional software that wold look up the CD info up with CDDB and would show the track names in the Tracker (the BeOS file manager)
Ok, how about the same with a DAT drive?
If you connect an SGI DAT drive to an IRIX machine, you can save the tracks in the same way. And they get saved in the faster, native DAT sample rate. 48Khz, I believe.
> BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files
MacOS modern and classic both do this as well
Now I should have known that. Fact is amazingly, I have never played an audio CD on a Mac. Ever.
So, that leaves Windows basically as the odd one out.
Love this place for threads line this.
Nice catch to you as well, and I am going to go play a CD on My M1 via USB optical drive next week.
> I have never played an audio CD on a Mac. Ever.
I'm not 100% certain I never played an audio CD on a Mac.
The only Mac I've owned with an optical drive at all was a PowerBook G4. It's been 20 years, but I assume any audio CDs that went into it were to be meant to be ripped into iTunes and not played as audio CDs.
I commented a one up above. SGI IRIX computers connected to SGI DAT drives will gladly save audio off those as well.
Lol, just had to. :]
Yes! Be had it. A friend and I setup a Be station in the late 90's and really liked it.
Nice catch.
CDE killed off openlook, another nice desktop environment mostly on Sun workstations. Lots of time spent on both, with my optical mouse and optical mouse pad.
I still bemoan the demise of openlook and especially the "motorized" scrollbar. It was amazing how functional something as simple as a scrollbar can be when pushed ot its limits.
I hate the "clean" look of modern UI toolkits where functionality is being removed in the name of some "minimalist" ideal and the choices of what stays seem completely arbitrary or at best are a common source denominator between what's viable with a mouse pointer and a finger touch.
I think a window manager project without a single screenshot should be illegal
Yeah. I used openlook on a Sun grayscale monitor. Would be interesting to see what it looks like in color.
I wish I could replace windows shell with that one. Or openlook or cde
This almost seems more like an OS than a desktop. (microservices, messaging)
I guess my opinion is biased given my longterm use of "window managers", specifically fluxbox.
Maybe the features of this are more in line with the development environments provided by gnome of KDDE?
too much use of italic / oblique
I love(d) it. Makes the menu stand right out.
My current Raspi 400 desktop has that same setup. Menu items all italic and bold.
It's a shame that it's not (visibly) open source. There's so much that could be done at this point. The shambling corpse of SGI is dead enough that anything left of their legal department must be absolutely destroyed.
<< All the legacy code is under the SGI Special License Agreement and not available. Binaries are available as FREE-WARE for Linux (intel) platform. However we are in the process of changing the license to BSD 3-Clause, but it is complicated.
All new code under the MaXX Interactive Desktop Project is under a BSD 3-Clause License and is available at https://gitlab.com/maxxdesktop
Little known fact is that the SGI 5.6+ (certainly 6) settings controls was the first "electron app".
It ran a mozilla process, with CSS1.x to style the controls like Motif. And the Javascript code interacted with the underlying XUL hacks in a manner not much different from WebOS palm used decades later.
Pretty sure that app ended up in IRIX 5.3.
Used to be called 5DWM.
Also CDE is now open source, being actively maintained, and is still the CDE you remember. Even on a vintage hosting platform https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
When I worked at HP in the mid 80s I met the guys there that developed the UI design of CDE. Ironically done on Macintosh IIs using Pixelpaint. It was a very nice design.
It was but VUE was way nicer. CDE was boring and businesslike, neutered by the suits from IBM.
Solarized Dark keeps CDE alive for me, sortof.
Did they update dtksh with Korn's final ksh93 release?
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
What I really want is HPUX's SAM on this
Yeah SAM was way ahead of its time.
While I enjoyed 4dwm when I had a sgi, I am not convinced the desktop environment was that great, it did however have a very nice file manager, which I guess is 90% of a desktop environment, so perhaps it was pretty good after all.
The best sgi ui innovation, which unfortunately I rarely see anywhere else, was the use of drop pockets, these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
I was unable to find a good example with multiple pockets, but for example: when you see that blue square in the file manager, you know you can drop something there and it will try to use it as a path.
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/user-experience-ux/pa...
Vaguely related, I saw an extremely nice little bit of UI on a MRI machine console the other day. When planning a sequence of scans, you drag them into a listbox. But once that listbox is "full" from top to bottom, it's hard to append to the end (rather than inserting between two existing scans), because you keep having to hit that tiny 1px wide target between the bottom of the box and the last entry.
So someone at Bruker noticed this, and made a drop target UNDER the listbox that's labeled Drop Here to Append. It makes things SO much more pleasant.
Best screenshot I could find online: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Horea-Christian/publica...
This reminds me of the drag and drop system in Risc OS, in that it's a little unusual:
https://telcontar.net/Misc/GUI/RISCOS/#files.operations
these are drag and drop targets, small squares that are uniformly styled to give the user a hint that dropping something here is useful.
Something similar exists in macOS, but isn't widely used, as far as I can tell.
You can create a script in Automator that does things with an input file, and then save it as a desktop icon that you can drop things onto. I have a few of these for auto-resizing images.
(Bonus: Because it's done in Automator, you can also have the same script appear under Quick Actions when you Option-click the file/s.)
Panic's Transmit allows you to create a desktop icon that sends whatever's dropped on it to a server via FTP, SFTP, S3, Google Drive, or a dozen other methods.
Had great scrollbars. When dragged there would be a shadow to show where the bar was. So you could go back if needed. Also the first platform I noticed that you could middle click the scrollbar to move directly, or control click the titlebar to lower. Though those conventions may have been from Motif?
It listed wm hot keys on the window menu and had vector icons. Yes, believe it was the best desktop of the era.
Would like to see an improved version of it, not merely a faithful reproduction. I hesitate to say modern because it often means dumbed-down. But made for higher resolution would be great.
The name makes me think of Holomaxx Technologies (styled as holoMaXx technologies), the vanity DBA of one Ilarion Bilynsky, also known as SsZERO. SsZERO was a squirrely guy with an interesting USENET presence in the late nineties. At first he was a bit like the later Imari Stevenson: a spoiled, videogame-obsessed teenager whose confidence far exceeded his competence. He promised the Holomaxx Ultimate Video Game Project or UVGP, a kickass game console that would beat all others and even feature AGI, to everyone on rec.games.programmer and several other newsgroups, and became quite truculent, to the point of rudeness, when actual game devs replied with constructive criticism. He accused them all of "thinking linearly", as opposed to his own "dimensional thinking". This was a TimeCube-like epistemology of Ilarion's creation, under which a circle can be a straight line at the same time, if you rotate it by 90 degrees, given by 90(n) so 90(45) would be a line at a 45-degree angle, that still had the properties of the original circle. It was also critical to how the UVGP worked, as it would possess "dimensional logic" and a "dimensional information crossover" or DFX. If you note that "information" begins with I and not with F, well, you're just not thinking dimensionally my friend.
Needless to say the UVGP never came to fruition, or else it exists in a higher dimension us linear thinkers just can't comprehend. Ilarion would then pivot Holomaxx into a reseller of computer and audiophile parts (thousand-dollar speaker wires and the like), as well as a bespoke web development company (I think they claimed Kazaa as a client). They are most famous, however, for unsuccessfully suing Microsoft and Yahoo! because the spam filters at those two providers filtered out correspondence originating from Holomaxx as spam. The case of Holomaxx Techs. v. Microsoft is cited in case law concerning the reach of the CAN-SPAM Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, in terms of how much discretion a provider has in filtering communications going over their network that are, in the provider's determination, harmful.
I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that until I dived in and checked out the authorship, I wondered if Ilarion were involved with this desktop project. It sounds like the sort of thing he might get involved with, especially since SGI was synonymous with "kickass computing power" among gamers in the 90s. Thanks for the trip down 90s USENET memory lane, MaXX Desktop!
These comments are what I pay internet for.
How did we have this at one point but now we have gnome and it’s single threaded , bad extensions take down the whole session desktop manager?
gnome was hijacked long ago to undermine linux adoption. I will not elaborate any further.
They killed galleon in Gnome 2, which was the best browser of its era, replacing it with epiphany. iBM was behind it. Ever since then there has been a lack of innovation on Linux with web browsers and since konqueror is a former shell of itself, killed file manager innovation as well
That explains why they made tray icons so hard to work with. It sounds like a conspiracy theory but I buy it
This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in the day.
I'm curious how you mean? I'm mainly on PopOs nowadays, and it seems largely fine? What are the main annoyances?
Rounded corners and huge paddings
I'll take filled rounded corners over the window border bulge atrocity seen in IRIX.
Also keep in mind IRIX (and most classic desktops) assumed 72 DPI displays rather than 96 DPI displays. That means when you view a screenshot or render them unadjusted they look 75% the size they did back in the day. Still plenty denser in many ways... just not as much as loading it up on a modern "96 DPI is 100%" screen would imply.
I miss real window borders that you could see and drag—what a concept.
This. The very reason I use KDE (I have tried tiling wm's, and they are horrible if I use my drawing tablet, which I use a LOT), then customize it in a way to minimize wasted space (taskbar on the left, take out window borders padding, etc).
Then I go and enable compact look on firefox, take out a bunch of useless icons for things I don't use, and bam my 4K screen is able to accommodate all my work. Even though I do still use 125% DPI scale, not via KDE mind you, because I love eyes.
And even then, it still looks slick and modern. It's crazy how much space we waste with flat design on desktop. Crazyyy.
Out of curiosity, what was the showstopper on dwm?
I tend to have one hand holding a pen on a drawing tablet. I could customise any wm to be controlled with just the left side of the keyboard obviously but I fear I would have arthritis from doing that.
I'm half joking, I did use i3 for a few years, and have tried many others (bspwm comes to mind). But currently it makes no sense to use keyboard centric wms of any kind.
> dwm is customized through editing its source code
Sounds scary but it's giving you some compile-time guarantees about correctness.
StumpWM and XMonad do the same and they are quite easy to use, especially the former.
They also lead to very space-efficient setups. Windows can be tightly packed.
StumpWM is in a special position here as "compile-time" on Common Lisp is roughly the same thing as "runtime".
Sure, my statement referred to dwm, and it also applies to XMonad.
The only compile time guarantee you'd have by making changes is that it would run, not it being correct nor functional.
Static types do provide some guarantees as they rule out an entire class of runtime errors. In case of XMonad, since Haskell's type system is more expressive, the class of runtime errors ruled out at compile-time is broader.
OpenLook would like to have a word about those corners…
(But yes, in general it's all custom "cards" and list views. HTML didn't allow a good set of GUI widgets, so people adapted, and now the cruel circle has closed with desktop UIs being "informed" by web and mobile views)
Funny, I'll have to look when back at a computer in a few days. I don't recall the padding being that bad. Granted... I do largely use it as an emacs machine. I'm sure that colors what I notice.
Well, they didn't serve you ads on the start menu...
They did (sort of). They were called demos and trials. But there was no DRM. FlexLM was easy to crack. The WWW was largely plaintext.
I sadly fried my Octane 2 at some point (and got my Indy's, DS10L Mac Pro G5 (also RIP and Suns to the garbage waste disposal). The Octane 2 specifically was also using a lot of Watt. But it was fun to play with, and of course it ran IRIX ;)
(I still remember how good the audio card in the Indy was compared to my PC's.)
I noticed other day prices are still high on eBay. Better off buying recent enterprise stuff (mind the Watts though).
One funny thing to note is SGI completely missed out on the AI era and boom.
FlexLM dev tools were supplied as part of the operating system distribution.
One could make a simple app to parse, check in, out, licenses and work from there.
Sure beats breaking out the low level tools!
Indy sound is great! I agree and had one playing music for years.
This is great. Perhaps it's finally time for me to upgrade from my SGI Fuel to a Linux system running MaXX: https://triosdevelopers.com/~jason.eckert/trios/SGI_Fuel.jpg
You still use your fuel? Nice.
What upgrades do you have? I only have a 500Mhz cpu, but i have 4 Gb and I put in an ssd. I also put in a modern power supply which makes it a little less loud.
Man that thing is loud
In addition to bumping it to 4GB, the only upgrade I did was for the HDD. I'm not sure if mine has a quieter PSU, but it doesn't seem (to me at least) to be louder than any other PC when running.
900MHz, 4GB and a DCD V12. Need to fix the PSU, but I love the Big Red look. And hey, it's quieter than a Tezro.
I forgot I also have a V12, but no DCD. I also have a sound card, but its mot connected (my old PSU gave me problems as it died)
Or you could just run this on it, which would probably compile just fine on Linux-MIPS: https://github.com/rhaleblian/pirix
man SGI cases were sweet looking back in the day.
I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The Photo Gallery [1] features a couple of installations, running on 4k screen hardware and a Xeon X5690 as it seems, but is still based on CentOS from 2004 and running a Linux 4.18 kernel?
Do they have compilation problems or kernel mod problems, or that they need to port their display server and kernel mods to newer APIs in the upstream kernel?
Looking at the roadmap [2] this looks like a major development effort with huge stories along the way. Is there a foundation people can support financially?
[1] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/misc/page/photo-galle...
[2] https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/whats-next/page/novem...
> I'm a little confused of what the current state of the project is.
The project seems to be sleeping. The development was veeery slow. It was not open source so, in the end, CDE is the way to go if you need something like this.
The file manager in this looks a lot like my beloved ROX-Filer. Would love to try this if I could install it on FreeBSD. I don't see it in a cursory glance at Ports.
It is indeed ROX, at least it was in the 2020 release.
Sadly this is closed source and only amd64 Linux binaries are available..
FreeBSD support is listed on the site as a goal/feature (I've no idea which one), but I've no idea whether its aspirational or not:
> To run on multiple OS: Linux, FreeBSD and Windows11 WSL2.
The actual installation instructions seem to be for Linux kernels sadly.
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati...
Click “installation guides” > “book not found”.
I’m so tired.
I found a working link in the release announcement. https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati...
I'm curious how projects like this have been impacted by the Wayland work?
In ten years maybe we'll know.
Short answer: dead
Man, I sure hope this project can get traction.
The Indigo Magic Desktop coupled with the 4DWM X window manager was among the top computing experiences I've had! At my peak, I was a sysadmin for our setup where I worked and as a reseller, was basically a remote sysadmin for a fair number of other installations.
Used to keep lists of Free Juno numbers while traveling just so I could get online in the days before fairly ubiquitous free or low cost wi-fi. Dial up on those was what? 2.5kbytes per sec, or thereabouts.
Plenty for that kind of support work, but I digress!
I loved it. The red pointer, which I continue to use to this day, crisp interactions, launch/event sounds, drop pads, and too many other niceties to list here, made for great experiences.
And IRIX itself was no joke. The scheduler is amazing! It remained responsive in almost all scenarios.
Once, for a training class, I had updated the software revision. But, on one machine I had left the app open with some action pending.
I saw one student appearing to run the old revision, which I thought impossible because those files were gone! Well, IRIX cached the whole damn thing. gr_osview showed a huge file cache, which I saw evaporate once the app was closed all the way.
Then things were just fine. Excellent!
And the tools. How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
Want to remote display a high end CAD package with 3D rendering and the works? 4DWM with the GLX extensions handled it nicely.
....
Anyhow, I hope this gets some momentum. I would love to run it and maybe show it off to some younger users in the building what computing was like.
> How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.
The CD Player in BeOS could save all or parts of CD Tracks. Also, BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files, I can't remember which. There was also some optional software that wold look up the CD info up with CDDB and would show the track names in the Tracker (the BeOS file manager)
Ok, how about the same with a DAT drive?
If you connect an SGI DAT drive to an IRIX machine, you can save the tracks in the same way. And they get saved in the faster, native DAT sample rate. 48Khz, I believe.
> BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files
MacOS modern and classic both do this as well
Now I should have known that. Fact is amazingly, I have never played an audio CD on a Mac. Ever.
So, that leaves Windows basically as the odd one out.
Love this place for threads line this.
Nice catch to you as well, and I am going to go play a CD on My M1 via USB optical drive next week.
> I have never played an audio CD on a Mac. Ever.
I'm not 100% certain I never played an audio CD on a Mac.
The only Mac I've owned with an optical drive at all was a PowerBook G4. It's been 20 years, but I assume any audio CDs that went into it were to be meant to be ripped into iTunes and not played as audio CDs.
I commented a one up above. SGI IRIX computers connected to SGI DAT drives will gladly save audio off those as well.
Lol, just had to. :]
Yes! Be had it. A friend and I setup a Be station in the late 90's and really liked it.
Nice catch.
CDE killed off openlook, another nice desktop environment mostly on Sun workstations. Lots of time spent on both, with my optical mouse and optical mouse pad.
Looks like there's an open source clone though
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openlook/
I still bemoan the demise of openlook and especially the "motorized" scrollbar. It was amazing how functional something as simple as a scrollbar can be when pushed ot its limits.
I hate the "clean" look of modern UI toolkits where functionality is being removed in the name of some "minimalist" ideal and the choices of what stays seem completely arbitrary or at best are a common source denominator between what's viable with a mouse pointer and a finger touch.
I think a window manager project without a single screenshot should be illegal
Yeah. I used openlook on a Sun grayscale monitor. Would be interesting to see what it looks like in color.
Like this -> http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/skins/nextstart/open...
Hmm, windows hacked to look like openlook?
The link to "Installation Guides" https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/mid-v211-installation... at the bottom of the page next to the Slack/Facebook/Bluebird icons 404s :(
The correct link is https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati... as far as I can tell
All the Big Endianness you could want.
EMWM can do that without propietary components.
I wish I could replace windows shell with that one. Or openlook or cde
This almost seems more like an OS than a desktop. (microservices, messaging)
I guess my opinion is biased given my longterm use of "window managers", specifically fluxbox.
Maybe the features of this are more in line with the development environments provided by gnome of KDDE?
too much use of italic / oblique
I love(d) it. Makes the menu stand right out.
My current Raspi 400 desktop has that same setup. Menu items all italic and bold.
It's a shame that it's not (visibly) open source. There's so much that could be done at this point. The shambling corpse of SGI is dead enough that anything left of their legal department must be absolutely destroyed.
<< All the legacy code is under the SGI Special License Agreement and not available. Binaries are available as FREE-WARE for Linux (intel) platform. However we are in the process of changing the license to BSD 3-Clause, but it is complicated.
All new code under the MaXX Interactive Desktop Project is under a BSD 3-Clause License and is available at https://gitlab.com/maxxdesktop
>>
Read more here:
https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/licensing/page/sgi-sp...
Oh cool, I’ll come back after it’s BSD, this looks neat!