What about OPEN LOOK?

Back in the days I used various window toolkits, first X11, then Sunview, OPEN LOOK, Motif, CDE, FVWM, Enlightment and Gnome. After that I more or less switched to Mac OS X.

As I now think about getting back to old style UNIX on a Raspberry Pi, I am thinking about of a suitable window system for it. X11 is too old fashioned in my view and I never really liked the heavy graphics in Motif. OPEN LOOK was actually kind of nice, it was very clean and well designed. Of the listed ones, it is probably the only one I really miss.

Are people still using it, or was OPEN LOOK given a silent burial at sea that I missed?

Is it possible to find an RPM for it?

You could have started here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEN_LOOK

As there is no mentioning of Linux anywhere in that article, I doubt you will find an implementation for it on Linux, let alone on openSUSE.

Maybe you should try and find out what windows software (including window managers and desktop environments) is used in todays Linux distributions. Most Linux users will e.g. have no idea what Motif is (was), etc. Thus you will have problems communicating with them.

Hi
Not sure you will get code from 2005 to compile…
https://sourceforge.net/projects/openlook/files/

There was a CDE project on OBS, not sure of the status… I just fire up my SunBlade150 for the sake of old times… :wink:

Consider iceWM which will have better integration with current base tools, I personally prefer twin (https://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/) on my RPi3’s and good old CLI apps…

Mentioned in the Wikipedia article…
Take a look at this
https://sourceforge.net/projects/owacomp/files/OWacomp/

Actively maintained and developed!
RPMs intened for RHEL which just might work on openSUSE!
Might give you a Solaris “look and feel” on Linux…

TSU

Hi
Ahh, not really if you read the text… repackaged binary blobs and patches, no thanks… still old code looking at the few source rpms that are provided (circa 2012), glib 2.6.0… OP is running aarch64…

Hi
Now CDE may be an option, this is maintained and tested on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed…

https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/files/src/
https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/SupportedPlatforms/

Will it build for aarch64, not sure, might take days to compile on a RPi…

I found a Fedora source rpm for xview (which is the X11 implementation of OPEN LOOK). After some minor fiddling with it I managed to build it. Unfortunately it crashes in all kinds of ways. Not really anything I feel inclined to dig deeper into at the moment.

CDE is essentially Motif. I think the graphics is too heavy for my taste, but I may give it a try at some point.

Twin is not my cup of tea, it gives me too much MS-DOS feeling. But in some way it is true, a couple of shells and Emacs is what I have running most of the time.

At the moment I use XFCE which is quite good. I enjoy that selecting a window does not need to raise it and managed to tell it to prevent new windows from stealing focus. I guess I will stay with it for the moment.

Hi
The other one I’ve played with is spectrewm;

Let me update and see if it builds for aarch64…

Are you running Leap 15.0 or Tumbleweed on your RPi? Is this a 3(+) so aarch64…

I am on RPI 3B+ and Leap 15.0 at the moment (aarch64). RPi as it was for doing something different and have some fun, and to try out aarch64. Leap 15.0 as I am new I thought that would be the best way to start until I know better.

That spectrwm is tiling window manager. I tried xmonad before (I am very familiar with Haskell) and it was an interesting experience, mostly positive actually. The reason I left it was that sometimes applications pops up a new window or dialog and that disrupted my workspace too much. Emacs was actually the guilty one here.

I put the OPEN LOOK back on the shelf in the back of my head. It seems that it may need some maintenance to be useful and I have no idea how much that could be. It most likely is far more than I can manage at the moment.

Hi
So spectrwm 3.1.0 is built if you want to give it a whirl…

I tried the one-click install, but it failed in the end. YaST2 says it could not be installed, and not much more information.
Running it manually says “No provider of ‘spectrwm’ found.”.

I have your Leap 15.0 repository in the repository list.

Hi
This one?
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/malcolmlewis:/ADS-B/openSUSE_Leap_15.0_Ports/

That one worked better!

The one I got on one-click/downloading was http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/malcolmlewis:/openSUSE_General/openSUSE_Leap_15.0/ which did not work for me.

I gave spectrwm a spin and it seems to work fine on RPi/aarch64. I think that I will need to arrange to have the most common key bindings on a printout when I try to navigate my way around with it, though some bindings were quite natural.