SGI & The IMD4Linux Project? 28
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?"
Wow (Score:1, Funny)
past history? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
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
unfashionable chunky widget look.
Agreed (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow (Score:1)
Fix the misspellings, for a start (Score:1, Insightful)
seams -> seems
I don't know anything about the project, but from the information on the website it seems that it is an extension of SGI's source code. How did the author get the source code in the first place to extend? Why would he expect, other than verbal assurances from sources inside SGI, that he would be licensed to release the code.
Likewise, if he intends to release the code under the GPL, he is essentially forcing SGI to release their code under GPL because he would not be able
Re:Fix the misspellings, for a start (Score:1)
BTW, your comment seems to be a
Re:Fix the misspellings, for a start (Score:4, Informative)
He didnt, AFAICT, it's a clone of SGI's Indigo Magic Desktop, including the window manager, 4Dwm (hence why his site is 5Dwm) and the widgets SGI added, as well as some of the apps. Read the information on the front page of the site a bit more carefully:
IMD4Linux is the IRIX Interactive Desktop rebuilt from scratch on Linux using today's technologies and SGI's Interactive Desktop as guideline.
The legal issues are presumably due to the use of SGI trademarks, which is hinted at in the letter, the bit where he says:
I changed the project name from 'Indigo Magic Desktop for Linux' to 'IMD4Linux'
However, it's hard to tell for sure as the site doesnt seem to have more in the way of detail on the SGI legal/whatever issues bar that letter of his. It does appear to be his source though.
Motif? (Score:3, Insightful)
GPL? (Score:2, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a great project... (Score:1)
SGI engineers actually told me about 5dwm (Score:3, Informative)
Re:SGI engineers actually told me about 5dwm (Score:2)
Perhaps I am missing something (Score:2)
Perhaps somebody could enlighten me (no pun intended) about what makes 4DWM so great?
Re:Perhaps I am missing something (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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)
Re:Perhaps I am missing something (Score:2)
If it's just the icons you like... (Score:2, Interesting)
I created a Gnome SVG icon set of almost all of the SGI icons:
http://www.webninja.com/files/Iris-0.4.ta r
Additionally, if you would rather generate your own
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.
We don't need a clone of it (Score:1)
Seems to me we should borrow the good things from it and incorporate it into KDE and Gnome. The sparkle thing on app start up is cool, do that. The simplicity
Know this guy (Score:2)
He was always battling it out with SGI on one level or another.. sad, really, since it doesn't actually COMPETE with any of their products (if you buy an SGI, you're not doing it because you like their widgets.)
S