Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

After the big commotion surrounding the open-sourcing of CDE, there was another open-sourcing, but this time of Motif, which was also released under the LGPL.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/

Not many people paid attention to this event, though, unfortunately. Motif was one of the missing pieces from the software ecosystem -- something that commercial Unix systems have had for a long time, but was never available under an open-source license on Linux or BSD.

I've always really loved the look of the Motif window manager, and despised X11's default TWM. Recently, I've been using FVWM, but it is configured to look and act very similar to MWM. I prefer FVWM these days because it has support for virtual desktops and Unicode fonts.

Since Motif has been around for a long time, and used in a variety of ways on commercial Unix systems, I'm guessing that some members of Nekochan have workstations or servers running MWM. Would anyone like to share screenshots of MWM from their systems?

I did some motif (and X) coding ~10 years ago, truth is, it's very difficult; then I migrated to gtk, which is dead simple to use (especially compared to motif).

I'm sure the look of motif can be "easily" emulated, but not the coding pain it inflicted to devs; I seriously think Motif was written to sell books.

Don't get me wrong, I really like mwm, but from a user standpoint only.

Motif is, and probably always will be, the user interface toolkit of choice for the very highest end of the spectrum, for example Pro/ENGINEER uses it, Maya uses it, and then the brain dead morons who run the X foundation go and declare that the X Toolkit Intrinsics is deprecated. WTF!? Unix in particular and X in general have been wriggling on the stake of the mechanism-not-policy non-decision for 25 years and the end is nowhere in sight.

So anyway, rant aside (I could go on for hours) I've been using mwm on my Linux computers since Linux came out, mwm is not an exciting window manager so this is not an exciting screenshot but here it is:

Thinking back on it a little further (gosh, the memories!) my recollection is that Motif was first ported to Linux by either Metrolink or Xi Graphics, both companies subsequently cratered but Xi Graphics has risen from the ashes numerous times and is still looking to mine investorite and stay in business: http://www.xig.com/

I bought Motif on CD from Metrolink around 1995, prior to that I never used Linux because, let's be honest, TWM and Athena are horrible kludges that no one should ever have to use. Quite simply, the MIT group did an incredible job on Xlib and Xt and then just completely dropped the ball on the window manager and widget set. Personally, I think they were worn out and used mechanism-not-policy as an excuse to give up, at which point the commercial Unix industry got involved, and they obviously weren't going to give anything away, hence the toolkit wars and the OSF trying to milk Motif 1.1 for every possible nickel, despite the fact that it was so full of bugs as to be almost unusable, for which everyone in the OSF blamed every other member but themselves. No revisionist history there...

Xaw = the sound you make trying to program with it

And then, instead of fixing their toolkit they decided they could make it "compete with Motif" if they made it look 3D like the Motif widgets! Talk about compounding the idiocy...

Just a small but important distinction : Motif was released as open source but only for non-commercial operating systemns . So you are not "allowed" to use it on Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP-UX, etc etc.

Now, as a descendant of people who walked across a continent, faced down Indians, malaria, distemper, freezing winters and blazing hot summers, no telephones and no KFC, I say they can take their "allowed" and shove it up their rosy red behinds. But that's a personal decision ...

No they really did release Motif as LGPL, in October 2012. Now if SGI would get off their dead asses and release Viewkit, we might actually be getting somewhere...

seeing cde, motif and all that on a linux pc feels like blasphemy
my personal taste of course, maybe it can be used for something nice but i don't wanna see some ipod kiddies making it more "modern"

I think all the attention deficit disorder kiddies are hacking on Gnome. It's the only explanation that makes sense...

haha good for motif then

You're right, vish, I'm out of date again Just six months this time, tho.

Last time I looked into this tho, there was plenty enough controversy to go around and it looks like the children can't keep their hands out of this one either. There is some goofiness going on between the Open Corporation and the other place, with both claiming to be the One True Motif yet neither one is, and one or the other has been making their own Motif which has all kind of problems and breaks everything it looks at. This is, naturally enough, the one on Sourceforge.

2.1.30 (I think) is the actual Motif you want that works like Motif is supposed to, while the New One (2.3.x ?) is yet another Chinese fire drill delivered to us by clown car. Caveat emptor.

Before they had "Open Motif," which was not truly open source, and was not truly part of the free software ecosystem because it had those restrictions. However, a few months ago after CDE was released under the LGPL, then Motif was also released under the LGPL. These days it is as much free software as anything else, which seems strange.


Wow, you've been using it since 1995 on Linux! That's amazing. I love that type of consistent software experience. I was reading Slashdot months ago, and one person said that he used TWM for many years, and never saw any great reason to change. Then sometime in the 1990's, he switched over to FVWM, and has been using that ever since. He was totally uninterested in new GUI environments, and said that he doesn't feel that he is missing out on anything.

Well, I've attached my FVWM setup, but it basically looks similar to MWM. It extends to a second larger monitor, but that wasn't included in the screenshot. The font being used is GNU Unifont, which covers basically every language (e.g. window titles will show Chinese or Japanese characters, even). The emulator is bsnes ( http://byuu.org/bsnes ).

Nice and clean ... that thing with the gnu unicode fonts isn't as great as you think tho. Wait until your assistant changes everything into chinese. File names are especially not-fun

Okay, here's a dumb Motif question ... under /usr/Motif-2.1/include/Sgm we have the SGI Motif customizations. Supposing one is compiling a Motif application, if you use the SGI headers do you get the SGI-appearing widgets ? or is there more involved ?

exactly that's the point. at some point a product is good. everything that comes after makes it worse but the majority always look for "new" and "modern" no matter what actually has been changed.
if people could overcome the "hey look i got the new version" ego needs we could make some actual progress ...

Now we'd like Apple/IBM to open source OpenDoc. The AIX version ran on Motif.

Coding pain is probably all relative to where you started out ... I began with Win16, then did Win32, and then programmed Xt/Motif apps, which at that time seemed so much better in terms of design and simplicity compared with Windows APIs, which really just seemed like they were an ad-hoc afterthought.

Mmmmm... Thunking layers... Not as perverse as a clockwork orange at all..

R.

Indeed, it seems like every GUI environment is going through some "revolution" or another. Between Unity, GNOME 3, and Windows 8, people have been complaining nonstop over the last year or two about their environments changing. For Unix command line tools, there are guidelines and examples of what we know works (and has worked for decades), but with GUI applications, it seems like everyone has a different philosophy about design, and a lot of it comes down to what is currently fashionable. It's like there are no clear engineering principles behind this mess.

On a positive note, we can still tune most of it out and stick with some consistent environments like MWM and FVWM...

that's the problem because for linux/bsd the app support is too poor on the desktop. so the only compromise is osx which is totally ruled by fashion as you called it.
on the desktop these days there's no separation between pro and private use which leads to everything being toyed up beyond recognition.

fortunately things change fast in the IT business so there's hope