What happened to 5dwm?

Posted 25 Oct 2002 at 23:10 UTC by coolvibe Share This

Yes, I used to have an O2 as a desktop machine. And yes, although the Magic Desktop on IRIX could be a bit finicky sometimes, it was a very thought out environment in which I could get all my work done.

A while back, someone made a Magic Desktop clone called 5dwm. Nowadays, the site is down, and there are no mirrors. What happened to the project? Did it die? I remember it was never open sourced. That's just too bad, if it was, it would have still existed :(

Does someone have any leads? Mirrors? Does the original author hang around on Advogato? Who knows? I just want to know what happened to a good looking project.


Not just 5dwm, posted 26 Oct 2002 at 07:07 UTC by garym » (Master)

I also had a Magic Desktop, and yes, it was. The perfect testament to what can go horribly wrong with the proprietary mindset; if only they were open source, we'd still have the SGI movie editor, still the finest of all the non-professional kits I have seen, free or otherwise.

My old Indy (a loaner from BGS) was full of such gems -- at the time, I would hold out the Indy as the only desktop on the market that, out of the box, could handle every type of content the Internet of the day could throw at it, best damn internet desktop ever made ... it's why I chose one Indy to sit among the macs and PCs at the Ontario Science Center "information highway" exhibit (although, oddly, the public would not use it because it apparently "looked too advanced"). I still remember the awe people had when I'd play 12 copies of the Jurassic Park trailer, all at the same time.

Another app I still miss: the drawing program from the University of Toronto Architecture school (forget the name). I did my first three years of website graphics with that, and none of the Corel/Illustrator clones even comes close to ease of use. The only old app I ever found was 'fly', the 3D file manager, but it just wasn't the same without a bit-blaster bus.

Good luck finding the 5dwm -- if it ever get's Gnome'd, count me in for a copy!

webarchive wayback machine, posted 26 Oct 2002 at 19:50 UTC by coolvibe » (Journeyer)

It seems that they have a copy of the page before it had gone down. Too bad you can't download the IMD for Linux there. :(

Here's a link to the archive.org page. No clue as of why the site has gone down.

Very sad indeed :(

Also on slashdot soon..., posted 26 Oct 2002 at 23:30 UTC by coolvibe » (Journeyer)

I submitted this and it got accepted. Good, I hope it will spark some nice discussion. :)

get the files there, posted 28 Oct 2002 at 16:17 UTC by gilbou » (Observer)

perso.wanadoo.fr/gilbert.fernandes/5dwm those are the last ones I got from the site just before it went down tell me if you ever track down the author

hrm?, posted 28 Oct 2002 at 16:37 UTC by mrsbrisby » (Journeyer)

the site doesn't appear down for me... I'm still able to download from it.

It doesn't appear to have seen an update since 2001, but the site does infact show up...

Perhaps INORE (their ISP) is blocking you? Perhaps there is a routing problem?

Or perhaps, they were just down when you went to look at them recently...

No it was down..., posted 31 Oct 2002 at 03:47 UTC by coolvibe » (Journeyer)

The author mailed me about the downtime. Yes it's back up now :)

Damn, almost forgot... Here's the mail Eric Masson sent me, posted 31 Oct 2002 at 03:56 UTC by coolvibe » (Journeyer)

From: Eric Masson <indigo2@SNIP>
To: <cliff@SNIP>
CC: <coolvibe@SNIP>
Date:  Monday 20:03:41
Subject: IMD is not dead!

Hi,

I am Erik Masson, the creator of Indigo Magic Desktop for Linux. I've read the post on Slashdot yesterday (Sunday) and I had to come clean on the future of my project.

First, the project is far from being dead and I hope to convince you on that. Big changes in my life (personal and professional) forced my to lower my priority and time allocation on the IMD Project for quite some time now. Having said that, since a few months now, I was able to write more code and to maintain a closed distribution (underground releases) with some selected testers out there on the Net.

About the IMD Project. Well, part of the project will be hosted at SourceForge.net soon and most of the code will be made available there too. Things are moving faster and there are fewer bugs. Meaning, I am cooking a NEW version of IMD for Linux soon. My web site is back on line, that to Bernaps!

I have listed below some of the project highlights:

1) SGI Motif look and feel is 99% finish. Meaning that only a few standard widgets needs attention! 2) SGI Color Scheme is working quite nice and I have attached a few screenshots for you. 3) 5Dwm window manager is OK for launch. Refer to the 5dwm.org website for more details regarding features and schedules. 4) Toolchest is finished too and now supports auxiliary menu. 5) Laucheffect with sound (sparkling effect when an application is launched) finished 6) Cool desktop applications to bundle with the IM Desktop (gmemusage, gr_osview, xmcd, xmmix, ddd, mgdiff, xconfirm, xmms, etc.) Most of these applications have been modified in order to nicely integrate into the Indigo Magic Desktop environment. 7) Icon Vector library is working fine and will be integrated with my new version of iconCatalog and file-manager. Point to note, my vector library make use of OpenGL hardware acceleration (when available) or fail back to an hybrid OpenGL/X Primitives. The name of the game here is maximum speed with minimal CPU resource utilization. 8) A new framework is been created to facilities IRIX application migration to Linux. 9) Open Inventor toolkit is also available and way modified slightly. 10) Icon Catalog development is underway 11) Fm is underway too. 12) Special enhancements are made in both Motif and 5Dwm for Overlay Plane supports. 13) SGI is drafting a license agreement allowing me to work on IMD for Linux.

Thanks for you continuous interest in Indigo Magic Project and I hope to hear from you soon.

People are welcome to contact me directly at indigo2@sympatico.ca for questions

I am working a new website which should be up by end of this week.

Sincerely,

Eric Masson 5Dwm.org

Screenshots here:

IMD-Preview-1.0.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:40 227k
IMD_for_Linux.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:41 237k
sgi-motif-01.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:40 642k

aarrgghhh!, posted 31 Oct 2002 at 04:00 UTC by coolvibe » (Journeyer)

I'm a dunce. I can't do anything right. I messed up the links to the screenshots.

Dammit, can;t stop kicking myself for that. Here they are again, but this time, with the right domain.

IMD-Preview-1.0.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:40 227k
IMD_for_Linux.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:41 237k
sgi-motif-01.jpg 29-Oct-2002 03:40 642k

looking sharp, posted 4 Nov 2002 at 18:23 UTC by mrsbrisby » (Journeyer)

sorry, that's all i wanted to say :)

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!

X
Share this page