[Raion]

I'm not anywhere near successful at getting a satisfactory IRIX-style desktop on BSD. But that has not stopped my attempts.

As of right now, this is my desktop using CDE:



There's three goals I have to get CDE shoehorned into something that can at least decently replicate it:

1. Something like a toolchest to replace the CDE front panel

2. Removal of the CDE front panel (its currently not 100% toggleable, I will continue looking into this)

3. Adding iconbar, tint2 or another status bar system.

I used to use OpenBox+tint2, but I have decided to use CDE at least for a day or two to see how closely it feels.


Anyone have any suggestions or insight here? Is this something people would find useful?

[thunderbird32]

I'd find it useful. I quite like CDE, MWM, FVWM etc. Big fan of that aesthetic, and it'd be cool to get a way to make it closer to Indigo Magic Desktop in terms of looks.

[matyas]

Figure out a way to get this running on BSD?

http://maxxdesktop.arcadedaydream.com/In...omIIHxbyHU

[Raion]

Max desktop is not part of this discussion. The creator has difficulty dealing with criticism and he is entirely focused on a proprietary implementation of the desktop for Linux. It wouldn't even run under Linux emulation because of the fact that FreeBSD does not include a newer version of kernel system-calls that is needed to implement it

[kubatyszko]

There is a Japanese post showing (heavily) customized FVWM that really looks like IRIX..

http://t.nomoto.org/etc/

(edit, found english version as well)

http://t.nomoto.org/etc/index-e.html


You'll see 3 links on the bottom:

.fvwm2rcのみ  -- configuration only
.fvwm2rcとアイコン .   --- icons + configuration
.fvwm2rc,アイコン,壁紙一式(724kB) .   ---- all of the above + wallpapers

I haven't personally tried, but it seems like that's the closest it gets...

[shrek]

Alright, the best IRIX desktop clone available today is probably MaXX. I know some people here are less than satisfied with it (myself included) because it's closed source and limited to x86-64 Linux only, and as a result of being a one man project the development is EXTREMELY slow. I've seen some good ideas here. For now I think we should customize an open source window manager like FVWM to give it an IRIX look and feel. It's a nice short term compromise until we get people who understand Motif and MWM better to work on something like MaXX. FVWM runs on any *nix platform, it's easy to use and well documented. CDE is a real Motif based desktop and it is open source. However, it's filled with unpatched vulnerabilities, has a very small dev community, and the source code is archaic and hard to work with. And at the end of the day it's just MWM with outdated applications slapped on top. 

So to start making a serious clone, let's start with a Toolchest. As an application launcher for the desktop it's pretty important. I'm working on one now but I'm not the greatest programmer, and I don't have a ton of time to spare these days. What we need is an application that displays menus and submenus that are read from a config file somewhere in the system. As for the window borders, I've got that figured out. You can control this using a couple of lines in .Xdefaults to control which buttons and which borders/title bars show up for a specific program. You'll want to use the name of the binary and follow the syntax in the image below. Tested this on xclock as well and it works in MaXX and stock MWM. 

Info on menus in Motif:
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/motif/v.../ch15.html

Buttons and widgets and stuff:
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/motif/v.../ch03.html

Controlling window decorations, but in source code rather than Xdefaults:
http://www.motifdeveloper.com/tips/tip7.html

Stuff on widget placement I found useful:
https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/motif/v.../ch08.html

---

Oh, and I almost about the other applications that would really make an IRIX desktop clone usable. We would need to write a Motif based file manager from scratch. We have the icons and the widgets. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the SGI thumbwheel and other enhanced widgets were open sourced. So it's now a matter of finding good docs to understand how to implement these things. Gr_osview is just xosview with custom fonts and colors, so that'll be fairly easy to make. Then there's NEdit, which is already open source and ready to go. Winterm is a matter of applying the right colors and fonts to xterm and changing the title. This is pretty easy to do. The hard part would be adding a Motif based scroll bar to it. Xclock is easy to configure. I think gmemusage is open source, as it runs on Linux already. We can also steal dtcalc from CDE, which is open source. 

Even though an IRIX desktop clone seems like it's going to be a huge and difficult task, most of the work is done for us already. It's just a matter of getting the right defaults, look and feel, and making a toolchest and file manager. The file manager will be the most difficult part.

[Raion]

As promises have come and gone and there's still no good solution for the above; I'm going to start doing a series of surveys to start looking into the suitability of a replacement IRIX-style desktop environment written in C++98.

Below is the first such survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Q32ZQXB

I'm gathering facts so I can potentially see the most community-friendly method for doing this.

[Raion]

Reinstalled FreeBSD first on my laptop and got Tint2 and E16 working. Gonna continue to mess with E16 some, but using the IReX theme you can get incredibly close.

For terminal I'm using alacritty with special colors.

Images will follow sooner or later.

[Raion]

https://siliconimage.irixnet.org/index.p...encaps-BSD


Two screenshots, one showing off alacritty/neofetch, the other the background.

[Raion]

Some reasons I advocate FLTK are due to its more modern C++ support and its rather good centralized documentation. I will be experimenting with it myself as I learn the toolkit and seeing if I can replicate some IRIX programs.

One benefit for someone looking to do the file manager is it has SGI style scrollwheel widgets. The only downside is a lack of direct C bindings to it, though everything I'm doing with it is C++, and even then I'm avoiding C++11 when I see it. Slowly, I hope to get myself in a position to offer prototypes of IRIX programs under a FOSS license and with platform agnosticism when possible.