Most of you will be familiar with Silicon Graphics, Inc., once the proud leader in the graphics workstations market with their high-end MIPS workstations, running the UNIX System V based IRIX operating system. The company has been in steady decline for a long time now, and two years ago it put an end to its MIPS product line, favouring processors from Intel. Back to IRIX – it has many assets and good features (XFS, for instance), and the IRIX Interactive Desktop was certainly one of them. Sadly, it never properly made its way out of IRIX, but this is now being worked on, with the full support from SGI.
The MaXX Interactive Desktop is an effort to bring the IRIX Interactive Desktop to Linux (please note that this is a continuation of the 5dwm.org implementation, so not a case of re-inventing the wheel). In order to achieve this, MaXX Interactive, the commercial entity behind the project, has “a special license agreement from SGI enabling itself to push for a full implementation on Linux”. As they explain on their about page:
Our goal is to bring to the masses this great user experience which focus on performance, stability and productivity. So there is no surprise that the MaXX Desktop is a highly tuned Workstation Environment for the Linux x86, x86_64 and ia64 platforms.
The project has just released MaXX Desktop DR2 after a year of hard work, and it includes support for compositing, lives peacefully with KDM and GDM, and can be installed without any problems on Ubuntu and Fedora. The project is also looking towards the future, as they will create a spin-off project that will build on the classic Interactive Desktop look, but will try to enhance it, and make it more up-to-date.
I am not terribly thrilled though. i can think of a lot of interfaces that i liked more that would be considered unique. NEXT’s interface, BeOS’s interface, os/2’s interface, QNX’s Photon interface, actualy there are quite a bit of others. admitidly i never did get a chance to use IRIX, I did used ot use Maya but it was never on an SGI machine.
so since most of the site is still under construction, can someone tell me what makes this interfact so unique that it is worth bringing into the modern world? is apears to be a Motif looking interface like CDE from the screen shots. any IRIX experts here that can highlight some of IRIX Interactive Desktop’s unique and exciting features for me?
*NeXT
😉
Keep in mind that this is mid-90’s technology!
– Scalable, vector-based desktop icons
– Multimedia (read: Webcam, Audio and Video I/O (CDROMs are still neat-o, remember?)
– Standard X11 toolkit access (Motif) with all the 4dwm-specific stuff from SGI
– No CDE
– A comfortable UNIX Desktop environment (Circa 1994)
—-
It’s no BeOS, and certainly no NeXTSTEP/Openstep, but Indigo Magic has it’s “magic”.
Brings back fond memories of my old Indigo2 Extreme.
IRIX may not have been particularly innovative, but it really did have an appealing style. A certain je ne sais quoi….
I think this quote from the screenshot page explains it. It is about performance, not about style.
“Here is a recent screen shot from a QuadCore x86_64 bit Ubuntu 8.041 system running MaXX Desktop DR2 with a NVidia Quadro 1700FX. What is amazing to notice on that system is that no CPU is used when interacting with the 5Dwm window manager. Even when XComposite and our XCompMgr composition manager is enabled… This is really what MaXX Desktop is all about….”
SGI may be facing hard times financially. But there is definitely a degree of technical prestige associated with being the reporter of Linux kernel bugs such as these:
http://lwn.net/Articles/229873/
Edited 2008-10-09 01:35 UTC
I personally have been waiting on this release for a while and I’m really excited it’s finally here.
I am on the the same side of the fence as the others wondering what the fuss is all about.
Is someone serious/game enough to tell us all that a quad core machine will perform worse with the other hundred window managers like fluxbox/blackbox/wmaker etc that look similar and have similar goals? Would anyone tell the difference? Even on a P4?? There better be more to it than performance because nostalgia isn’t going to cut it with me.
For me it’s not so much about the performance though that is important. Some folks like gnome, some folks like kde, some folks like tiling wm’s and some folks like using a different *box window manager every few weeks. Me, I like CDE and the Indigo Magic desktop. I don’t see a lot of fuss about it but a few of us geeks are excited about this project. I think this is really cool and I’m happy it’s out there and supported by SGI. It also helps the Indigo Magic experience to live on and not die off with IRIX. And last but certainly not least, a little more variety and choice is always a good thing.
I really like the idea of a very snappy lightweigt full desktop environment – i.e. a fast powerful lightweight version of GNOME ,KDE or Xface .
I hope for them ,that there is a demand for what they are offering & developing .
They talk of high reliability – I do not know how SGI put IRIX together – but the reliability of this new desktop environment also depends on the reliability of the X Window System ,the drivers & the rest of the kernel .. etc. .
These three parts of the system are currently not developed with ultimate reliabilty & snappyness in mind ,which SGI on IRIX had more control of .
would probably be BFS, which brought extended attributes to a desktop-targetted OS.
Dominic Giampaolo worked at SGI before Be…
Looks like mix of Awesome and KDE for me.
I really don’t see anything on screeenshots except of ten-year-old aestetic and mess of icons on desktop.
IceWM is far cooler for “lightweight wm with icons” niche.
It’s nice to have just another WM, though
… I’m not intereseted in starting a flame thread, BUT …
Can somebody please tell me what is so special about “yet another wm for X.org”?
I never used a SGI Workstation and when I’m looking at the screenshot I would call it a windowmanager clone.
It would be great if the article was telling me something about the product beside the fact that it exists.
Best Regards
The thing that most of us like about MaXX, is that it isn’t flashy, it’s simple and it’s fast. Plus, MaXX is GPU accelerated, not GPU enhanced like OS X, or Vista. It uses the GPU to off load the graphics processing from the CPU, not to add eye candy that ends up making the whole system just as slow as a non-GPU version.
As far as I’m aware all major modern window managers and toolkit offload operations in various degrees to the gpu.
The fact that they are using a compositing manager suggests that they too want a certain degree of “enhancing”, because compositing involves extra operations so it will be slower than drawing pixmaps directly to the frame buffer. What compositing does is that makes it appear smoother i.e. no flashing when pixmaps update or pixmap tearing (because textures are updated off screen and then shown).
Edited 2008-10-09 14:16 UTC
hell, even 2D operations in windows have been offloaded somewhat onto GPUs for 12 years or more.
Looks like a good alternative for people who want something the looks good but uses very low resources. I hope that they eventually switch to a more standard licsense that allows for use on systems other than x86 Linux and that they stop distributing stuff with binary blobs and go “all open” but as it stands, it’s a pretty good thing.
That’s a restriction from SGI. Eric was only able to do this project and not get sued because he got permission from SGI first. They (for what reason I don’t know) put these restrictions on him.
MaXX Desktop exists because it can. It’s not just another WM, it’s a complete desktop. If you don’t like the idea of another desktop/WM, well that’s your problem. Some of us do.
MaXX has a clean and consistent UI. The window manager has been tweaked to give the optimal performance with the lowest CPU overhead. If you have an Nvidia card, Maxx flies.
This project may not satisfy anyone but if you are into OpenGL and object oriented programming, MaXX will fit the bill.
MaXX emulates 4Dwm and the Indigo magic Desktop. Other projects recreate NeXT or BeOS. Pick your favorite.
The code will be as free and open source as it can be, within the restrictions of the license. SGI has been very cool about all this and we don’t want to spoil that.
And due to this license restriction, MaXX will only run on Linux x86 and this will not change for the foreseeable future,
I would like them to sell it bundled with Debian-MIPS on Loongson desktops. A better SGI feeling!!!
Could you elaborate on that? I’m interested in both
MaXX’s apis will have OpenGL and QT tightly integrated (I think an early version was Java, don’t quote me on that).
To repeat the point: MaXX will only run on Linux x86 (and x86_64) for the foreseeable future.
Thank you twm_bucket,
finally somebody answered by questions (even though you didn’t replied to my comment). 🙂
My conclusion: Linux is too much diversified, focusing the engagement of all this briliant (or less briliant but still motivated^^) programmers could fix the gap between linux and end user requirements. What I see in project like that is just the ego of the developers who want to show off, that they will do it better (again…). Kind of penis envy, isn’t it? 😉
Regards….
I don’t care how others feel about this, but I’m excited. I’ve been waiting a long time for this to be released.
Thank You!
What’s the point of using such an old WM? 4DWM brings.. well, what, to the mixture?
I’ve used SGI’s and I’m not sure if their WM really had anything to offer the modern WMs?