Ambient Desktop Goes Open Source

mlankton writes "The only thing that looked neat about MorphOS is now free. The Ambient desktop has been open sourced, with source code here. It would be cool if someone ported this to Darwin so Apple users could play with it. I always thought MorphOS looked great, just no apps."

fp

[Anonymous Coward]

your a fruitbasket

Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC?

[Gherald]

When MAC announced their "Mini", it caught my eye. Wanting to buy/build a small computer for my already cramped breakfast bar, I started pricing out similar hardware. The results startled me. Most of the configurations I found were more than the humble US$499 of the "Mini", often much more. To match price I had to configure with a much bigger shuttle-style case.

My question is this. What PCs are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what real computer ca

Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC?

[jcenters]

[Quagmire] Heh heh. I got a question for you. Why are you still here? [/Quagmire]

Re:Good question

[mlankton]

Really I could care less about GPL compliance. For years I was a NeXT user that also had a PC with FreeBSD on it so I could have A) a workstation with fantastic gui integration, a sophisticated environment to work in (NeXT), and B) apps (FreeBSD). Since switching to mac with OS X 10.1 I have everything I need in terms of unix apps, commercial apps, and the nicest looking, fastest, and most cohesive gui to date.
OS X isn't for everyone, but if some of the mac haters out there ever had a chance to use one they

Vewy pretty

[m50d]

From the screenshots on the site, it does look really nice. I doubt it will immediately replace KDE and GNOME, but if enough of a developer community springs up around it, it has the potential to do so.

Huzzah!

[SPQRDecker]

Wow, from the screenshots, Ambient looks beautiful. I, for one, am elated that it's now open source. Although I don't think that it will catch on as a mainstream desktop as a real alternative to Gnome or KDE, developers in either camp (or maybe even MorphOS developers) would be wise to take a good look and incorporate some of this into their own work. Alternately, if this could be ported or made compatible with Gtk or Qt,it could be integrated into an already functional desktop environment. It's bitmap

Re:Huzzah!

[dont_think_twice]

What exactly do you find so beautiful about Ambient? It looks just like any of the typical gnu/linux window managers: fvwm, openbox, fluxbox, etc. I don't have anything against Ambient - I am just wondering what exactly you think should be copied. I can't find anything on any of those screenshots that I havent seen many times before.

Re:Huzzah!

[SPQRDecker]

For one thing, MUI. It provides the user a very powerful way of customizing his or her own desktop environment to a rediculous degree. In other words, point and click theme creation and editing. It is to Ambient what the Gimp is to images. As far as I know, there isn't much that one can do to design a custom theme in either Gnome or KDE without editing text files by hand. The most either of the two of them will let you do is specify a premade theme for individual parts of the desktop (background, wind

hmmm

[XO]

Why won't he use the acronym form of the Ambient's Sound System? Hmm...

Jerkoff.

More or less bound to Morphos

[frederik]

Porting this to GNU/Linux or BSD or whatever - as it was suggested here - should be pretty hard. I didn't look at the sources, but I suppose it was neither written for a POSIX environment nor does it use a GUI toolkit that is available on any other platform than the AMIGAish (MUI afaik - there once was a free MUI clone for X11 http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/3883/ z une/). So rewriting an Ambient-like Desktop for X11 from scratch might even be easier than porting it. But the free sources should