Open Motif Everywhere: ICS Launches Open Source Distribution and Portal

Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (ICS) announced the immediate availability of Open Motif Everywhere, the first distribution of Open Motif for open systems. This announcement occurs concurrently with the announcement by The Open GroupTM that it is making Open Motif, the industry standard toolkit for user interfaces on UNIX® systems, freely available for open source operating systems such as Linux® and FreeBSD. Open Motif Everywhere is the ICS distribution of Open Motif built from the official Open Group sources. It is free and available for all popular Linux and FreeBSD environments. It will include open source enhancements to improve its integration with the Linux Gnome and KDE desktop environments. ICS is making the binaries and sources to Open Motif Everywhere available for free download through ICS' new Motif portal site, http://www.motifzone.net. A CD-ROM distribution, containing binaries for most popular Linux and FreeBSD distributions, Open Motif source code, postscript versions of the official Motif 2.1 Manual set and email installation support is available through the MotifZone too.

Annual support contracts are offered for commercial customers. Open Motif Everywhere has been tested on the following distributions: Corel (Intel), FreeBSD (Intel), Linux PPC 2000 (PPC), Mandrake (Intel), Red Hat (Intel, Sparc, Alpha), Slackware (Intel), Storm 2000 (Intel), SuSE (Intel), and TurboLinux (Intel). In addition, Open Motif Everywhere is expected to work on other Linux distributions because of the high degree of binary compatibility between Linux systems.

See http://www.motifzone.net for specific details on supported releases. ICS also launched a new Internet portal, the MotifZone (http://www.motifzone.net), that will form a center for continued open source development of Motif. The first results of open system development for Motif are expected to make their appearance on the MotifZone this week and will be integrated into the next release of Open Motif Everywhere. The most exciting of these projects are targeted at allowing Motif applications to inherit the 'themes' or 'skin' designs from the Linux desktops. Descriptions of these and other open source projects for Open Motif are provided in the 'Motif Bazaar' portion of the MotifZone. Open Motif Everywhere is immediately available for download at the MotifZone. Orders are being taken now for the CD-ROM version that will ship later this week.

The CD-ROM version will include 30 days of email installation support and will be priced at $29.95 (USD) plus shipping costs. ICS is the current market leader in Motif graphical user interface development tools, Builder Xcessory PRO (BX PRO). In its fifth major release and representing over 100 person years of effort, BX PRO defines a level of sophistication, functionality and ease of use that is unmatched in the industry. In November of 1999, the combination of BX PRO from ICS and Code Fusion from Red Hat software was awarded the Editor's Choice award by the leading Linux magazine, The Linux Journal, for the Best New Application for Software Development. Commenting on the importance of this alliance, The Linux Journal described the software as 'The first Visual C/C++ equivalent for Linux.'