[HN Gopher] MaXX Interactive Desktop -- the little brother of th...
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MaXX Interactive Desktop -- the little brother of the great SGI
Desktop on IRIX
Author : gjvc
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-11-22 23:21 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.maxxinteractive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.maxxinteractive.com)
| rhabarba wrote:
| This is actually nice. Desktops were much less annoying back in
| the day.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, they didn't serve you ads on the start menu...
| Fnoord wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious how you mean? I'm mainly on PopOs nowadays, and it
| seems largely fine? What are the main annoyances?
| oguz-ismail wrote:
| Rounded corners and huge paddings
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| spookie wrote:
| 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.
| DrPhish wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what was the showstopper on dwm?
| oguz-ismail wrote:
| > dwm is customized through editing its source code
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I miss real window borders that you could see and drag--
| what a concept.
| mhd wrote:
| 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)
| indrora wrote:
| 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.
| hbbio wrote:
| << 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...
| analognoise wrote:
| Oh cool, I'll come back after it's BSD, this looks neat!
| bitwize wrote:
| 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!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| These comments are what I pay internet for.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| 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
| fusivdh wrote:
| 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
| jasoneckert wrote:
| 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.
| classichasclass wrote:
| 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.
| fusivdh wrote:
| 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)
| classichasclass wrote:
| Or you could just run this on it, which would probably compile
| just fine on Linux-MIPS: https://github.com/rhaleblian/pirix
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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/
| Fnoord wrote:
| Solarized Dark keeps CDE alive for me, sortof.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| Did they update dtksh with Korn's final ksh93 release?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
| Lammy wrote:
| 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.
| girvo wrote:
| 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...
| hexagonwin wrote:
| It is indeed ROX, at least it was in the 2020 release.
|
| Sadly this is closed source and only amd64 Linux binaries are
| available..
| gigatexal wrote:
| 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?
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| gnome was hijacked long ago to undermine linux adoption. I will
| not elaborate any further.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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 :(
| girvo wrote:
| The correct link is
| https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/books/octane-v22-installati...
| as far as I can tell
| taeric wrote:
| I'm curious how projects like this have been impacted by the
| Wayland work?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| In ten years maybe we'll know.
| somat wrote:
| 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...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| dmd wrote:
| 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...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| 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.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| 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...
| hulitu wrote:
| > 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.
| bonaldi wrote:
| Click "installation guides" > "book not found".
|
| I'm so tired.
| bastloing wrote:
| 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/
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I think a window manager project without a single screenshot
| should be illegal
| bastloing wrote:
| Yeah. I used openlook on a Sun grayscale monitor. Would be
| interesting to see what it looks like in color.
| gjvc wrote:
| _too much use of italic / oblique_
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| Pretty sure that app ended up in IRIX 5.3.
| anthk wrote:
| EMWM can do that without propietary components.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > 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)
| johnea wrote:
| 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?
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