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Silicon Graphics

SGI releases "Jessie" to the Open Source 91

Posted by HeUnique from the more-stuff-from-sgi dept.
SGI has released "Jessie" to the Open Source World. Jessie is an IDE for use on top of current development tools in the Linux OS. Here is a screenshot of Jessie. Note: The page is a bit outdated (it doesn't mention that there are some IDE for Linux such as CodeWarrior of CodeFusion). Thanks for Linux Today for the story.
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SGI releases "Jessie" to the Open Source More

SGI releases "Jessie" to the Open Source

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  • I agree 100%. I installed a TrueType font server and my display looks so much better. I finally found something good on a microsoft CD. The fonts.

    There is a how to on doing it but I don't have it on me. I have it written down at home. You want me to send it to you send me some email and I'll do it. My email address in the header is valid.

  • Right - interesting.
    On first sight it looked to me to be very similar to cvd. I have to say that that is the best debugger I've ever used - I do sort of real time work ( haptics 1KHz updates ) and it worked really well and the GL stuff was neat. Also, you could use emacs near it reasonably well which was cool.
    It seems to show what a great company you guys are , ( oh shit I'm crawling ) and I just hope the new name is not SGI for soon going insolvent.
  • I use xemacs, but I can't really claim to understand it. I know how to do the basics, but all the help seems to rely on the user knowing the right questions to ask the help system.

    In a previous article I asked about the resources available to allow someone new to get a handle on the Mozilla code. In this thread I have a related question:

    Are there any references that give a fairly straight line "here's everything that's useful" introduction to using xemacs (or emacs, I don't really know the difference) to productively work on a large C++ project such as Mozilla? Something that points out all the features that will make working on a large project manageable?

    I've stumbled onto a few useful features, but I'm sure there are other features buried in the ridiculous cascade of menus that I'll never discover unless someone points them out.

    I think part of the reason that IDEs get so much more attention than emacs is that if you don't have 5+ years of experience using emacs you probably aren't aware of enough of the features to make emacs do what an IDE does out of the box.

    The advantage that an IDE has is that with its much smaller (more focused) feature set it can have a tutorial that gets you productive right away. The emacs tutorial (last time I checked) wastes your time telling you how to move your cursor even though nearly every keyboard produced in the last 5 years has had perfectly good arrow, page up&down, and home&end buttons.

  • At the top of the source tree:

    find /absolute/path -name '*.[cChH]' -print | etags -


    For OO browsing, have a look at the OOBrowser [beopen.org] for GNU Emacs and XEmacs.
  • I've been wondering about this myself. (Although personally I'm interested in using with KDevelop).

    Maybe it could also be given a Corba OpenParts and/or Corba Baboon wrapper. I've thought of doing an OpenParts wrapper for XEmacs myself, but I've never gotten around to it (haven't looked into it to see if it's feasable).

    Of course a Qt or Gtk+ implementation of Emacs would also be nice, but a lot more work.

    ---------------------------
  • Did I say GPL? No. I just said it was another license that I have to take time to read and figure out its interactions with other licenses...
    read the essay I linked to. BSD is fine, X11 is fine, Artistic is fine. Whatever. But don't go off making up new licenses just because you can.
  • I hear about this all the time, and I'm really curious as to what it looks like. Are there screenshots of this wm posted anywhere?

  • Re:4dWM (Score:1)

    by irix ( 22687 )
    I couldn't resist. I took a shot of my desktop - Irix 6.2 on an Indigo2. I'll get around to upgrading to Irix 6.5 soon...

    http://www.tomandian.com/tmp/scrn.gif [tomandian.com]

    Enjoy :)

  • Analysis of gprof? It sounds that this is worth looking at after all. Reading gprof output is a completely pain.

    Don't know what SpeedShop is. Can they be used on Linux or are they SGI specific?
  • For specialized debugging like realtime, Jessie might be exactly what you need. The ability to quickly write your own panel for specialized realtime information seems like it would be a good thing. New panels are very easy to create and the information can come from anywhere, not just the debugging session. Additionally, this new panel can be part of and fully interact with, via the message brokering system, the rest of the debugging session.

    For instance, you have external timing information that is being collected by running another process. If the times being become unacceptable (i.e. things are taking too long), you can send a message saying "stop everything" and then you can use the debugger functionality to poke around and see what is going on.

    You can also have multiple debugging sessions going on at one time in a single jessie window. Thus, you can watch the different processes simultaneously. In fact, come to think of it, your new panel could attach to some offending process and bring it under debugger control, automagically.

  • Re:Fonts (Score:3)

    by daviddennis ( 10926 ) <david@amazing.com> on Friday August 27, 1999 @05:08AM (#1722791) Homepage
    The best fonts in the Unix world are, unsurprisingly, on SGI machines. You can pick up a used Indigo2 for pretty cheap nowadays, and use it as a front-end for your Linux systems. That's what I did, and I'm happy as a clam.

    I just wish people wouldn't keep on using Helvetica on their web pages - that's the only bad SGI font :-(.

    The Enlightenment window manager comes with some nice readable fonts - you might want to try that too.

    D

    My document on buying a used SGI machine:
    http://www.amazing.com/internet/old-sgi-faq.html

    ----
  • I've written code for Windows much more than for Linux recently... and that looks very familiar.
  • I'm not talking about those weirdo 3000 font CDs. 2998 of those are crap.

    Well, not all of them are bad. The one I have actually has a couple of dozen good ones for general purposes and a whole bunch of decorative fonts that while not good for general purpose uses, are useful for signs, wedding/party invitations, flyers, etc. But you do have to watch out, because not all of the cheap font CDs are good, especially the ones that are Windows TrueType only. I've found the ones that have both Postscript and TrueType and are set up for both PC and Mac seem to be better on average.

    All I want is a good helvetica, courier new and arial.

    Frankly, I think arial sucks. It looks like a bad, low budget clone of Helvetica. I don't see any advantages of 'courier new' over plain old courier. My solution is generally to just make links from 'courier new' pointing to my regular courier and from 'arial' to my helvetica.

    That's it. And why the heck should I have to install a true type font server?

    Actually some of the newer distributions include one these days, so you may not have to do much to set one up.

    Can't everyone see that the default fonts are ugly?

    They aren't that bad for most purposes... I don't think most people care that much.

    Just build it in!

    Get someone to contribute some fonts you like as freeware and I'm sure the distros would be glad to include them.

  • I have found that Code Crusader [caltech.edu] is a good IDE. It's easy to use and GPL'd.

    I was REALLY disappointed in what I saw and read about Jesse! This CAN'T be what SGI develops in, can it?

    Quicker

  • Ahhh, but to use the arrow, page up, page down, and home, end buttons, you have to move your hand from the letters...

    There is reason to everything in EMACS; take the time to learn it. You'll soon understand why the investment in time is so worth it... Learn EMACS LISP... Use C-s, C-r to jump the cursor to wherever you want to be... Use the kill buffer...

    It reminds me of something I read in Usenet once: "Format Windows. Install Linux. Do not be afraid, All Shall Be Revealed."

    Personally, I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that EMACS can extend to every textbox, textarea, etc., etc.,...

    You'll find that EMACS keys are built into a lot of applications. (I am speaking of C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-b, C-f).
  • DDD is nice. A bit on the slow side but quite nice. It is lacking in area of integration with another tools ( or maybe it is my problem of not knowing how to set it up properly).
  • DDD can be integrated with a couple of editors ((X)Emacs is one). But the author strongly advices against it. And I do too, since you will lose the tooltips when hoovering above a variable.
  • Hmmn, I'm a bit surprised at the complaints from the people in this forum. Where's the spirit of free software? Instead of saying things like, "this is just a front end to gdb", or it lacks "X widget" and "Y widget", we should be saying to ourselves, "Wow, this is a great idea, I wish it had this feature, so I'm going to try and code it and submit a patch!" Then someone else contributes another patch, and soon we've got a super IDE.

    I mean, isn't that how Linux happened? Isn't that the spirit of free software. If you're going to post something like, "Why doesn't Jessie have this feature" replace the word Jessie with "Linux Kernel" and you probably won't be wanting to post that message, but you'll want to get coding!

    Thanks for the free software gift SGI, much appreciated. Looking forward to the release of XFS
  • No, we should be pushing people to use software licenses which permit free redistribution instead of licenses which do not (GPL, LGPL).
  • A bit unfair making such a strong assertion without even trying the software,no?

    If SGI have a good debugger, maybe they know what they're doing.

    Cheers!
  • I agree. I loke SGI and I think is the only company that have changed its mind in GPL dirction (no SGI-PL, G-SGI, OPEN-Sgi:...). Thanks for your work Sgi.
  • I think we shold use licenses that works, GPL works better than the other... GNU/Linux is the example of what GPL can do;)
  • Speedshop is the performance analysis tool that SGI has on their Irix systems. We are porting it to Linux (and IA32/64 systems), but the effort is moving slowly. We are considering open sourcing SpeedShop. Internally, we consider SpeedShop to be a very powerful performance analysis tool. It has significantly more functionality than gprof and we have received good reviews from our customers. -Bill
  • The first comment is a bit mean spirited.

    SGI are doing GOOD things and choice == freedom.
  • I agree that the 4DWm is quite good. I'm perfectly happy using it. However, on my main SGI at work I run Windowmaker. 'My' other SGI's use 4DWm though.

    In my opinion, people sometimes mix up 4DWm (the window manager) with the 'magic' desktop. SGI's desktop environment is quite extensive and 4DWm is just one component of it.

    My (tiny) problem with 4DWm is that it's a little too Motif-like for my taste. Lucky there are lots of window managers around now :-)

    If there were no copyright problems (surely not?), then there's little reason *not* to open-source 4DWm.
  • Put into the correct perspective, the "sort of lame" comment is actually be a positive thing. Ok, Ok, you're saying to yourself "another confused developer veers into the weeds". Let me explain. In Jessie, we tried very hard to make things incredibly simple, efficient and intuitive, rather than inflict a horrible intellectual overhead and learning curve upon new users. We would rather use existing useful UI precedence than make up new overly complex ones that everyone has to learn. This simple and efficient focus is NOT, however, at the expense of power. For instance, a key point of Jessie is that it remains in a single window, rather than spewing windows all over the screen at the slightest provocation. Look at all the other debuggers, almost every one has a separate window for every discrete bit of functionality. When you start debugging serious codes (i.e. threads, large code size, etc.), the problems with windowitis become evident very quickly. Throw in the notion of multiple debug sessions within one debugger invocation and the focus issues bite you in the butt.

    Thus, appearing simple and unassuming, may (and I emphasize 'may') lead one to believe that there is nothing interesting underneath the hood and is thus 'lame'. I can assure you that there is plenty under the hood that doesn't exist in any other linux IDE and there is more yet to come.

  • I've used some of the command-line SpeedShop tools (ssrun/prof and ssusage) on our Origin, and they are quite nice. The way you can do profiling without having to recompile an instrumented version of your code is slick.

    What I would kill for, OTOH, is a version of perfex that runs under Linux. (Perfex gives you access to the CPUs' hardware performance counters, so you can directly measure things like MFLOPS and cache miss rates -- it's the bomb for doing performance tuning and optimization of scientific codes.) The various Linux performance counter drivers are almost to the point where you could port perfex to use them; I just wish the developers would come to a consenus on which one would go in the mainstream kernel. (Hint, hint.)

    --Troy
  • I really like SGI. They really are very helpful to the Linux community. They have now released two great things to Open Source and they have such a respected name that they are adding credibility to the whole movement. I hope they keep up the good work!
  • Then why don't you use TrueType fonts. You need to install a TrueType font server, xfstt is one.
  • actually i found better font support in macOS
    than windows, but i didnt really play much with
    with fonts in either (except in photoshop and
    illustrator). i kinda remember NExTsTeP (i dont
    remember the correct capitalization) having nice
    looking fonts too.

    anyway nexus looks nice, though you have to fiddle
    with emacs (give it the entire font string,
    xfontsel can be a good help with this) and there
    are a few other nice looking fonts...

    methinks part of the problem is in the rendering
    and there also the fact there is no good front
    end to installing fonts in X (that i know of).
    too bad mkfontdir does not work with postscript
    or true type fonts. fonts are still a mess in X.
    anyone know if this will be better in XF86 4.0?

    the only times i think the fonts look bad are with
    style sheets enabled in netscape and a few other
    cases where the font rendering is clearly not anti
    aliased.
  • i just downloaded it, the page and the FTP site
    state clearly that the code is under the GPL!

    im willing to look, but it better be pretty good
    for me to switch from xemacs...

  • Re:Fonts (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Everytime I try to use Linux or Solaris the ugliness of the fonts and the clunkiness of the GUI make me switch back to windows.

    You really do base your choice of OS on the ___important stuff___.

    Perhaps you should try a Mac, they have even more excellent font rendering.

    /Lars

  • They're catering to the vi crowd... ;) who else could the possibly be after?


    While on this subject, has anyone got used the xemacs widget for much? I keep thinking that if it had a GTK+ wrapper, and it plugged in with glade or gIDE or something it would be pretty much unstoppable.

  • Agreed. I don't understand the appeal of IDEs such
    as this --
    it lacks scriptability, extensibility, support for languages other than those debugged by gdb (Emacs supports Perl, Haskell, and Smalltalk, just to name those that I work with) and requires Java. No way I'm gonna install that huge JDK (or even JRE) for just this....

    OTOH, the profiler is pretty. Maybe it can be broken out and used separately.... compiled with gcj, it might even be fast enough to be usable. :-) (though Swing presents a bit of a difficulty, i guess)
  • I think the tape player metaphor evidenced in the screenshot is a nice idea. I also like the keyword highlighting. The article says it's in Java. Does that mean I have to run it in my web browser? Or am I just being ignorant?

    The blurb said something about CodeWarrior. I used the Windoze version of it and the "project" interface is horrible. I think I'll try SGI's IDE.


  • Looking from the Debugger screenshot it seems pretty lame. Compare with the excellent debugger DDD, which beats the pants out of every other debugger I've used so far.

    Actually, when I worked with SGI-computer four years ago I used a very good debugger. DDD has lended many ideas from that debugger. Currently, I can'r remember the name.
  • Perl, Haskell and Smalltalk is nothing. Emacs has
    special support for TeX, makefiles, java,
    lisp, scheme, Eiffel, Sather, C, C++, Shell script and probably a lot of other stuff too.
  • From http://oss.sgi.com/projects/jessie/li cense.html [sgi.com]:
    3.Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate automatically if Recipient fails to comply with terms herein and fails to cure such breach within 30 days of the breach.
    .
    .
    .

    Sure doesn't look like the GPL or even a DFSG-compliant license. :-/
    I can't get through to the FTP site, so I don't know if it says differently there.
  • It's a bit of a cliche I know, but why would I give up emacs for this? Don't get me wrong, I like the fancy graphics but I'm not going to give up the whole host of emacs lisp code for pretty buttons - things like editing modes for every language under the sun, nice integration with gdb, customisable colour highlighting, integration with make and grep, and total customisability. They'd be better off spending their time adding fancy buttons to emacs than writing yet another lame IDE.
  • emacs (and xemacs) is the best in my opinion as well, but it is missing a couple things, and
    integrated source browser (and for OO people
    a class browser) so users can do things like take a struct and see where its defined and/or
    where its used, class heirarchys etc...
    it could save alot of time greping when
    you have to fix clients huge messy source trees.

    of course there probably is already elisp out
    there that does this...

    i know cygnus sells a source browser but i dont know if it integrates with emacs or if its under
    GPL (i was under the impression that everything
    they did was GPL but i could not find the source
    for download on thier web site)
  • there is a serious gap in the linux development

    thats IDE

    yes you can moan on about emacs and vi
    and yes I use them

    lets think project managment if you have ever been on a large project it is impossible to co-ordinate everybody without cutting down a small forest !

    this was solved by useing tools
    yes debuggers help and if anyone says they dont they have never written a large project in a small time frame !

    IDE help they take some of the pain out of useing lots of differant tools that dont play well togther in the same sandpit

    what we (linux) needs is project management tools and before anyone moans that they dont work everything can be abused hell I can write bad cobol, bad java, bad c and bad C++ (not to hard) but I dont because I know the conventions and their limertations when working with Booch or UML you have to know their flaws (UML has lots) but they ARE useful

    SGI has tryed to address what they see as a gap WELL DONE SGI

    whats more they have made it look the same under GNOME and KDE (although the screen shot is GNOME)

    thank you
    (for reading what is my most sensible post)

    john jones


    a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
  • The Mac is a nice machine. I always regretted needing to switch from the Mac to Win95. Of course it's a bit programmer-hostile, but again, nothing compared to Windows. I always recommend the Mac to non-techno folk. It's much easier to use than anything else I've encountered. It's not easier to program, but that's really not the same issue. Different target audience. We hope to someday make Linux as friendly to tyro's as the Mac is, but we've a long way to go.
  • Now if they would just release the source code for their window manager, that would make me happy.

    I keep an old indigo(irix 5.3) on my desk and find that I use it mostly for an xterm and management station.

    b
  • How is this post informative? It looks like pandering to me.


    It is informative because it shows the sort of feelings that SGI is engendering in the Linux community by not playing lip service to Open Source but making real contributions.

    Their current strategy is right on. They are the only large company that really understands the whole Open Source thing and they believe that they have found a way to be profitable in the new environment. I think it will work.

  • I agree. It looks like SGI is really committed to the Open Source model.

    I've just bought some SGI stock to add to my Linux portfolio (go RHAT!!).
    It's a bargain now that the Micros~1 investors have bailed out....
  • Dont get me wrong, having a graphical debugger is nice. But when they say "IDE" I think of more than just a debugger. I also think project manager and editor, at the very least.

    I haven't downloaded, not looking forward to trying to get java running on my machine. CodeCrusader is working fine for me for now.
  • The problem still remains that that requires knowing what I'm looking for. Most IDEs put most, if not all, the available features right out where you can find them. Emacs requires you to go search for them. If you haven't been using Emacs for years you probably don't even know the terms that the documentation uses to describe the things you need to know even if you know what you're searching for.

    A simple example from the Visual Basic macros in MS Word. A list of valid methods and properties displays whenever you type a period after an object name. This is something everyone discovers if they spend more than 10 minutes working on a Word macro. Emacs may have a similar feature, but there's no way you'd discover it by accident. You'd have to realize that such a feature exists and then go searching the documentation for whatever that feature might be called. That's why people like IDEs, they don't have to guess what helpful features may be available and then try to figure out how to get at them. The features are just there.
  • Emacs is a gui. It has menus and mouse support. Why do you want another front end to it??

  • As a non-emacs-er, are there GUI front ends avail for emacs, and do any of them provide IDE/debugger capability?

  • But many licenses work better than the GPL.

    FreeBSD, Apache, X Windows, SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, DEC UNIX, NeXT, IRIX, Unicos/mk, Mach, and dozens of others are examples of what free redistribution can give you. You should really know what you talk about before you post.

    I challenge you to find a modern Unix which does not contain a line of BSD code. Even your precious Linux has a few files with BSD copyrights at the top...

  • GUI with menus, mouse support? Awwright! (Excuse my ignorance, but then, I warned ya in advance...

  • >Perl, Haskell and Smalltalk is nothing. Emacs has
    >special support for TeX, makefiles, java,
    >lisp, scheme, Eiffel, Sather, C, C++, Shell
    >script and probably a lot of other stuff too.

    Of course. but i was referring to debugging support in the languages i use. I use AUCTeX all the time, plus a wad of the other font-highlighting modes... :)
  • If fonts are that important to you, get a Postscript and/or TrueType font server installed in your X environment, and then buy one of those '3000 fonts' CD packages... I had a couple of those sets left over from stuff I was doing on a Mac (but they are multi-platform format CDs) a couple of years ago, and they work fine with Linux, including printing to my non-Postscript laser printers using Ghostscript.

  • I want SGI to release CVD for Linux. I use CVD on a daily basis at work, and think its the best debugger I've ever seen. I would be really happy if CVD was released for Linux even if I had to pay for it.

    Anybody know if SGI plans to do this in the future?

  • I believe there is something in emacs than can "take a struct and see where its defined". I think it's called xtags or something, but I've never bothered to investigate.

    As for a true source browser, they don't impress me that much and those that I've seen have been pretty lame, especially the IDE integrated ones. But if you really want one they are probably extremely language specific (at least they are if they are going to be of any damned use). I don't want to have to learn a whole lot of new keystrokes and editing commands just because I'm using a different language.

    Moral of the story: If you have a good source browser INTEGRATE IT WITH EXISTING EDITORS.
  • K-Develop: an IDE with coder, debugger, dialog editor, class browser, kdoc (like javadoc). Now here is a real good IDE. Check out their site [kdevelop.org].

    Very good stuff. Looks much better than the simple screenshot from SGI.

  • integrated source browser (and for OO people a class browser) so users can do things like take a struct and see where its defined and/or where its used, class heirarchys etc...

    Actually the emacs Ada-mode [eu.org] has a nice xref thing going. It's really useful.

    - Aidan

  • Re:Fonts (Score:1)

    by Yarn ( 75 )
    I think this screenshot looks so bad because its jpeg compressed. The text itself is fine.

    As for windows fonts being better, I cant find a SINGLE windows font that does nice looking monospace text ala the linux terminal.
  • It also includes performance analysis functionality in it, with its ability to read gprof and SGI SpeedShop files. It also has rudimentary editing and static analysis type functionality. We are certainly looking for good ideas and are looking for folks to help build in this sort of functionality.

    Check out the "How To Contribute [sgi.com]" section to find out how to get involved.

  • I agree, that is a very nice feature of CVD, thus I have added scrollbar marking to the projects lists in the "How to Contribute Section [sgi.com]".
  • But it would be ideal for an introduction to programming course.
  • I don't speak for SGI, but I can say with some amount of certainty that CVD on Linux is not being planned. It is heavily tied to the MIPS architecture and the IRIX OS and would basically be a rewrite to accomplish.

    What particular aspects of CVD do you find the most useful? Those features should definitely be added to the projects list [sgi.com] for Jessie.

    As an aside, the Jessie team also works on CVD.

  • Yes, it was cvd that I used.

    It also showed the breakpoints as a read line in the scrollbar-area. Very nice, haven't seen it in another debugger.

  • etags (Score:3)

    by raistlinne ( 13725 ) <[lansdoct] [at] [cs.alfred.edu]> on Friday August 27, 1999 @04:26AM (#1722863) Homepage
    > of course there probably is already elisp out there that does this...

    Of course there is. It's called etags. You run the program like this:
    etags `find /source/of/project -type f | grep \.[cCh]+p*$`
    You unfortunately have to do this for each directory, though i suspect that you can define things out to use just one etags file. Then you just hit meta-. when the cursor is over a struct, variable, function, etc. and it brings you right to the definition, opening up all necessary files. Add in hooks to saving files in cc-mode, and you can auto-update your tags file when you save. I do this and it's so fast I don't even notice it happening (Admittedly, I'm on a 633 MHz Alpha, but even so, it is fast in and of itself). I highly recommend it. That and building with make in your xemacs window so that you can just middle click on a compile error and be brought to it, and you've got a large part of an IDE right there.

    Remember the Mantra: "Emacs can do everything."


  • Correction:
    It also showed the breakpoints as a RED line in the scrollbar-area. Very nice, haven't seen it in
    another debugger.
  • Install the Adobe Acrobat Reader, and configure X to use the fonts that come with it. Do the same for GhostScript.

    After I did that, the printing quality did improve a lot... You don't know the difference a good font makes until you see it.
  • software written in Java can be constructed in such a way that it can be executed as a standalone application without any need for a web browser or applet viewer.

    whether this particular software is an applet or a standalone application, well, I'm not _sure_, but I would imagine it is satandalone.

    a lot of people bust on Java and say it's slow and unstable - many of the stability and performance issues are actually the result of poor browser JVM implementations. it's been my experience that standalone applications are quite stable and acceptably not-that-slow.
  • It's on the Altrasoft [altrasoft.com] website.
    A pretty complete Smalltalk-like browser complete with graphical tree display. Supports a small slew :-) of languages.

    I think it's XEmacs only.

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