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Silicon Graphics

SGI Desktop Clone Gets A New Version On Fedora (maxxinteractive.com) 103

Posted by EditorDavid from the 5Dwm dept.
Silicon Graphics workstations used the IRIX Interactive Desktop (formerly called Indigo Magic Desktop) for its IRIX operating system (based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions). "Anyone who remembers working on a SGI machine probably has fond memories of the Magic Desktop for IRIX," remembered one Slashdot reader in 2002. At the time a project called 5Dwm was working on a clone, and its work is still being continued by MaXX Interactive. Today Slashdot reader Daniel Mark shared the news that after "several years and many long nights," the company is announcing a new release for Fedora 25, adding that "more Linux Distributions support will be added over the coming days/weeks." They're calling it "something new and fresh in the Linux Desktop space." The MaXX Desktop is available in two versions, the free Community Edition (CE) which provides basic SGI Desktop experience and the commercially available Professional Edition (PE) that comes with support, CPU and GPU specific optimizations and a full SGI Desktop experience... So there is no surprise here, the MaXX Desktop is a highly tuned Workstation Environment for the Linux x86_64 and ia64 platforms. Multi-core processing, NVidia GPU specific optimizations are among the things that makes the MaXX Desktop so fast, light-weight and stable.
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SGI Desktop Clone Gets A New Version On Fedora More

SGI Desktop Clone Gets A New Version On Fedora

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  • MaXX Desktop's site seems to be down.

  • I had fond memories of my 3Dfx Voodoo Rush card in the late 1990's. Once I started playing Quake and Quake 2 in full OpenGL color, my roommates ran out to get Voodoo I/II cards to go with their software-rendering Matrox cards. Of course, 3Dfx was the beginning of the end for Silicon Graphics.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You obviously have no idea what IRIX was used for. Go back to your 3D games and stop pretending to have a clue.

      • Re:Silicon Graphics... Meh... (Score:5, Informative)

        by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday June 04, 2017 @04:44PM (#54547711)

        You obviously have no idea what IRIX was used for.

        Overpriced machines that got replaced by commodity PCs with OpenGL cards. The hardware designers at Silicon Graphic hardware started nVidia to produce OpenGL cards when the market turned away from dedicated graphic machines.

        Go back to your 3D games and stop pretending to have a clue.

        Fine. I'll do that. My modest nVidia 740 2GB video card could probably run circles around your IRIX.

        • Re:Silicon Graphics... Meh... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday June 04, 2017 @04:57PM (#54547763)

          Ok everyone dicks out. Let's compare two decade old hardware to current generation.

          • Ok everyone dicks out. Let's compare two decade old hardware to current generation.

            I'll be standing in the gorilla-sized line. :P

            • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

              by Anonymous Coward

              I'll be standing in the gorilla-sized line. :P

              Hello from the chimpanzee-sized line!

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              I'll be standing in the gorilla-sized line. :P

              Yes you probably will be.

              http://www.berggorilla.org/en/gorillas/general/social-life/wie-sehen-die-geschlechtsorgane-eines-silberrueckenmanns-aus/

              The erect gorilla penis is only 3-6 cm (1-2 in) long, whereas that of a chimpanzee measures 8-18 cm (3-7 in) in length.

              Gotta go, someone's pounding on the front door.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              You know, for someone who's only ever used his penis to piss you talk a big game, virgin boy.

              • You know, for someone who's only ever used his penis to piss you talk a big game, virgin boy.

                If I was talking a big game, I would stand with chimpanzees. Those little fuckers get around.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Fine. I'll do that. My modest nVidia 740 2GB video card could probably run circles around your IRIX.

          Wow! You really have faster hardware than I have:

          $ /sbin/lspci | grep -i nvidia
          02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 2] (rev a1)
          09:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G92 [GeForce 8800 GT] (rev a2)

          both with 512MB dedicated RAM...

          • 2 different cards in SLI?

            $ lspci | grep -i nvidia | grep -i vga
            02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK208 [GeForce GT 640 Rev. 2] (rev a1)

            That's the 1GB GDDR5 SC version, basically an HTPC-centric card.

        • My modest nVidia 740 2GB video card could probably run circles around your IRIX.

          That's the DDR3 version isn't it?

          $ lspci | grep -i nvidia | grep -i vga
          02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK208 [GeForce GT 640 Rev. 2] (rev a1)

          That's the rev2 GDDR5 SC variant (which slightly outperforms the DDR3 740's). I've had it for 3 years and I just ordered its replacement a GTX 1050 TI SC. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M... [amazon.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sl3xd ( 111641 )

          hardware designers at Silicon Graphics

          Once its founders left, SGI's technical choices became downright backward ~20 years ago. nVidia, Keyhole (Google Maps), and others litter the landscape of great technology SGI could have sold, but its backwards leadership told the engineers who developed the technology to go fork themselves -- and they did.

        • Overpriced machines that got replaced by commodity PCs with OpenGL cards.

          Before 3dfx, 3d accelerators for PCs were colossally expensive. You weren't saving much money by using a PC, and then you had to use a PC. For many of those cards, the only OS support was for Windows. Windows of the day was a horrible nightmare garbagefest even compared to IRIX, which wasn't really as bad as people make it out to be architecturally but which did have many, many failings which were not replicated by the other Unixes of the day — notably in the arena of security.

          You also could physicall

      • You obviously have no idea what IRIX was used for. Go back to your 3D games and stop pretending to have a clue.

        Actually being around the people switching the Irix workstations with PCs and Open GL cards back in the day, I might have a bit of a clue there...

      • even wikipedia agrees.

        as consumer pc's got faster and faster they couldn't keep up. they could not keep up with raw cpu nor with 3d acceleration - and yes having a 3d accelerator earlier than others was a big thing for sgi.

        while it might have been on a shopping list for an effects studio in early 90's by late '90s it was out of the shopping list and sgi's fast decline around the turn of the millennium agrees. they could not keep up with speed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      I agree with the anonymous gentleman (of whatever gender) that you don't have a clue. Hardware 3D acceleration was just a tiny part of the reason SGI was popular back in the day, scalability in processors, memory, networking, storage and performance were all very important. And that scalability extended to 3D acceleration too.
      Nobody* bought SGI systems to run crude 3D accelerated games.

      (* Well some companies did use SGI systems to create VR game machines however the graphics wasn't crude for that time)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      grats, this is the dumbest fucking comment I have read on slashdot all day

      • grats, this is the dumbest fucking comment I have read on slashdot all day

        You should these guys out. They won't be around for long.

        https://slashdot.org/~criemer [slashdot.org]
        https://slashdot.org/~creinner [slashdot.org]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          /. management and myself have been investigating the possibility that you have been owning these alternate accounts all along to bring traffic to your sideline business.

          If so, you are very clever because following the threads made me laugh like I hadn't for a long time on slashdot and I have visited your blog and your amazon book pages ;-)

          Please open new fake accounts and keep this going! Please!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Also, I suggest that you set up a page on your blog where the list of fake accounts is updated for quicker reference.

          • Also, I suggest that you set up a page on your blog where the list of fake accounts is updated for quicker reference.

            I don't thinking have a "PWNED" page will increase my popularity on Slashdot.

  • Remote modeling (Score:5, Informative)

    by lfp98 ( 740073 ) on Sunday June 04, 2017 @05:06PM (#54547783)
    I used to do molecular modeling on an SGI machine. What was nice was that you could set up a remote desktop GUI on any Linux computer and work from anywhere.

  • The MaXX Desktop is available in two versions, the free Community Edition (CE) which provides basic SGI Desktop experience and the commercially available Professional Edition (PE) that comes with support, CPU and GPU specific optimizations and a full SGI Desktop experience... So there is no surprise here, the MaXX Desktop is a highly tuned Workstation Environment for the Linux x86_64 and ia64 platforms. Multi-core processing, NVidia GPU specific optimizations are among the things that makes the MaXX Desktop so fast, light-weight and stable.

    Apparently the SGI environment isn't the only thing that's backwards with them...

  • ...any of the associated software.

    The hardware? YES. Sheer fscking awesomeness. The software? Really, really crap.

    For all the *nix users out there who think we don't have a "Windows ME" in our history - you clearly missing out on 6.x series IRIX, especially in the early days. Crashing like SGI got $1 for everytime it crashed (and boy did SGI need the money from 97 onwards...)

    I miss the SGI IR2 that was in my office (they had to put it somewhere and I won the lottery) and would love to have it heating my office today - but the software? LULZ...

    • ...any of the associated software.

      The hardware? YES. Sheer fscking awesomeness. The software? Really, really crap.

      For all the *nix users out there who think we don't have a "Windows ME" in our history - you clearly missing out on 6.x series IRIX, especially in the early days. Crashing like SGI got $1 for everytime it crashed (and boy did SGI need the money from 97 onwards...)

      I miss the SGI IR2 that was in my office (they had to put it somewhere and I won the lottery) and would love to have it heating my office today - but the software? LULZ...

      Apparently you never used Sco Xenix aka OpenServer later on

    • What's really amusing is all the years that SGI put xhost + in the default X config, especially since virtually everyone was using routable IPs at the time

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Not to mention all the default unpassworded accounts that IRIX came with...

      • Now I'm no Linux expert but wouldn't that basically let ANYONE attempt a remote X session. Now sure, they'd still have to local credentials to actually do so, but anyone could try.

        Now admittedly there are circumstances one might want to do that, say if one knew they were going to need/want to remote in but didn't know what IP they might have. Of course in that case one would probably have key based auth set up and set the machine to basically ignore any user/password attempts.

        • Now I'm no Linux expert but wouldn't that basically let ANYONE attempt a remote X session. Now sure, they'd still have to local credentials to actually do so, but anyone could try.

          It's actually worse than that. You don't need credentials. You just DISPLAY=hostname:0 executable and bingo! You're connected to the X server. At which point you can log the user's keystrokes or whatever. dougmc kindly showed me the error of my ways when I connected an Indigo R3000 running IRIX 5.3 to Tivoli's network via ISDN when we were both working on-call support there. Ahh, those were the days, when ISDN was a reasonably fast connection.

  • Does it have the red mouse pointers?

  • C'mon, everyone knows the front end interface to a SGI machine is fsn, also known for the "it's a Unix system, I know this!" line from Jurassic Park.

  • I might install this just to scratch the nostalgia-itch... I'm imagining that it is so out-dated, that I will want to go back to KDE after a few minutes.

  • I remember my little Indy box. Had video conferencing and a nice interface. All the stuff Windows and Mac people think they invented first. Way ahead of its time. Too bad SGI screwed with the OS. We dumped them because it became impossible to get even simple stuff, like ping to compile without a hassle. Perl was a real chore.

    Wouldn't mind trying the new desktop out.

  • I learned UNIX, Motif, and "gl" (the precursor to OpenGL) on a purple Indigo 3000 in 1993. A year later I got the teal Indigo 2 and then they rolled out the Indigo Magic desktop. I shipped the first commercial application (called Elastic Reality) that was fully Indigo Magic style compliant. At the next SGI dev conference the IM folks gave me a cool (at the time) purple Indigo Magic jacket. It was quite the honor! I remember very fondly my days of working on the Indigo, Indigo 2, OCTANE, and eventually an In

    • It was quite the shame when I had an I2, OCTANE, and O2 in my basement that were essentially worthless. I gave them away.

      It was the power bills that killed interest in that hardware. People would still be using that stuff today (for amusement value, mind you) if it didn't cost so much to operate.

  • It seems this is a binary only release. Or did I miss something?

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