SGI & The IMD4Linux Project?

thomas536 asks: "I have been following the IMD4Linux Project and am currently using their desktop. The project developer has recently had some difficulty receiving a response from SGI concerning SGI's licensing and a possible partnership between SGI and IMD4Linux. This has resulted in him posting his last letter on the project website. Can anybody in the Slashdot community help him generate a (hopefully positive) response from SGI in this matter?"

past history?

[ArmorFiend]

Its actually moderately smexy in action. Not as nice as gnome 2.2 imnsho.

What's not clear from reading the article is exactly what prior relationship with sgi this guy has. It sounds like he has the source to all their code, including inventor and all that. Did he find a print-out in a dumpster and decide to start this project, then hope they'd climb on board? If so, he's lucky he's not a smoking boot right about now.

Re:past history?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect the reason they have not responded to his inquiries may be that they are readying their hordes of firebreathing lawyers. He obviously didn't have their buy-in before he started, and clearly should have pursued the licensing whatnot before getting this far. His letter sounds awfully demanding, like they owe him licensing or something, but I can think of a lot more reasons why they'd have a problem with this than why they'd want this program out there.

GPL?

[g4sy]

From following some of what this guy has posted on his site before, i recall him working on Open Inventor. Is all the code referred to not currently GPL'd, including IMD, or does he just want to GPL IMD alone?

What a great project...

[Gyler St. James]

I love the project's goal: to take SGI's well known desktop environment and re-create it to run on Linux. I'm not surprised that SGI hasn't done this before themselves or has given him any "blessings" that he's looking for. 4Dwm/5Dwm is old and kind of antiquated as a desktop, but still remains fast and stable. I have several SGI Indys, Octanes, and Indigos that I still run to this day, if only for nostalgia. I really like those Indys as they make great web servers. On the other hand, the desktop interface is antiquated and you can find most of the features in other WMs (such as Enlightenment). Either way, I don't think SGI will sue him for releasing his code. I'm afraid SGI might not even be around in 10 years for anyone to even care. Has anyone even seen the cost of buying Irix CDs? Although they still update the OS, who would buy them except for people like me who remember what it was like to work with these machines in their hayday?

Re:Wow

[Paul Jakma]

The chunky Motif widgets look perhaps just a bit dated, compared to todays mostly 'flat' widget looks, but that's just fashion really. Indigo Magic was an amazing desktop though, you have to use it to appreciate it. Especially the icon-zoom widget used in Indigo Magic's file browser - it had a thumbwheel along the side which you could roll to zoom in and out, and the vector drawn icons would smoothly zoom in and out. Also, there were neat eye-candy things thrown in for when you double-clicked on an icon - the icon would have an animated sparkle while the app started. The whole desktop was just nicely integrated, everything used SGI's Motif-extended IMD widgets. Really nice.

What you have to remember is that this desktop came into being around 94 or so. I'm not quite sure when, but I was using it in 95. It was just amazingly advanced, at least in terms of eye-candy :). Other systems were still using TWM or OpenLook. Indigo Magic Desktop still holds it own today against the likes of GNOME 2, even with the
unfashionable chunky widget look.

If it's just the icons you like...

[OiBoy]

Okay, blatant plug, since I wrote this, but if you like the IMD's scalable icons you can have them under Gnome.

I created a Gnome SVG icon set of almost all of the SGI icons:
http://www.webninja.com/files/Iris-0.4.tar .bz2.

Additionally, if you would rather generate your own .svg icons from the IRIX .fti icons, I wrote a perl script to do just that:
http://www.webninja.com/files/fti2svg.pl

You can see a screenshot here:
http://www.webninja.com/files/fti2svg.png

I actually improved on the originals a little. fti icons have a very limited color palette, and simulate other colors using dithering, the generated svg files use the actual color that was trying to be achieved. Additionally, fti icons have a color called 'shadow' that is generally used for drop-shadows. The generated svg files apply a 50% alpha to the 'shadow' color for a little extra eye candy. Gnome also antialiases svg icons, whereas IRIX does not (unless you have an Octane or newer and are running at least IRIX 6.5.22, this is a recent addition)

Re:Perhaps I am missing something

[OiBoy]

4Dwm isn't really the great part, it's not all that different from mwm, it's the other things that make up the IMD (fm, toolchest, etc)

Things I really like about IMD:

1. Drop pockets (I just think this is a slick way to handle drag and drop)
2. The shelf (I can associate a different shelf with any directory, which has icons for the applications I am likely to use with the files in that directory)
3. The toolchest (why should a menu have to take up the entire width of my screen?)
4. The file selection dialog (being able to click on part of a path and have the file browser jump to that part of the filesystem is nice)
5. The scroll wheel for scaling. (Okay, nautilus has the zoom buttons, but the scroll wheel just feels nicer to me)
6. tagging (This lets me assign an icon to a specific file rather than everything that matches that mime-type)
7. /hosts (I have a ton of NFS shares on my network, being able to just go to /hosts/hostname/sharename rather than creating a mount point, mounting, get what I need, unmount, is very nice. This is more an IRIX thing than an IMD thing, but whatever)
8. Open directory as different user (ie, I want to grab some files from root's home directory, I can just open a filemanager window as root rather then using xterm+su/sudo/etc)
9. Better remote X user awareness (I can have a desktop configuration for when I log into X locally or from machine y or machine z, etc, etc with no special configuration required, it just works)
10. CPU Eater! (if you don't know what I'm talking about, get on an SGI that has demos.sw.* installed and check out your background options)

Agreed

[vasqzr]

Innovation well before it's time.

Today everyone is concerned with transparent windows and skins and other eye candy, and not features that make things like file managers easier to use.