ICS integrates themes into Open Motif

Mark Hatch writes: “Integrated Computer Solutions, Inc. (ICS), the leading supplier of Motif® products and support, today announced the Developer’s Release of its initiative to add themes to Open Motif. Themes is a capability supplied with Linux desktop environments that provides users with the ability to personalize the overall look of the user interface of their desktop. The integration of themes into Open Motif will improve the usability of enterprise applications ported to Linux while allowing them to continue to be developed with the highly reliable Motif user interface toolkit.

The Developer Release of Themes for Open Motif works with GTK themes created for Gnome, the default desktop on Red Hat Linux. Currently, themes are converted by hand into a format that Open Motif can process. As the Open Motif Themes capability evolves, no conversion will be necessary and Open Motif based applications will automatically adopt the theme set by the end user. The objective of the initiative is to support both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments. ICS is actively looking to recruit other Open Source developers to help with this project.

“Motif is the industry standard, highly reliable user interface toolkit that enterprise applications use on systems from Sun, SGI, IBM, Compaq, HP, and others,” said Mark Hatch, Chief Operating Officer, ICS. “With Themes for Open Motif, enterprises can port their applications to Linux with less effort because they don’t have to worry about reengineering for compatibility with the Linux desktop.”

In addition, with the adoption of Gnome on non-Linux platforms, ICS is in discussions to provide themes capability for Motif on traditional UNIX platforms too. This will provide existing applications using Motif with further personalization facilities that will smooth portability between Linux and UNIX even further.

Availability

The Developer Release of Themes for Open Motif is available for free download at the Open Motif community site, http://www.motifzone.net. The completed work will become a standard part of ICS’ Open Motif Everywhere distribution. Changes made to the internals of Open Motif will be released under the Open Group Public license. Software written exclusively by ICS, and external to the Open Motif toolkit will be released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) originally developed by Netscape and an officially recognized open source license. This will allow the ICS software to be reused by other Open Source efforts.

About Integrated Computer Solutions
Founded in 1987, ICS (http://www.ics.com) was chartered to provide software development tools and training for developers working with the then emerging X Window System?. Prior to the widespread adoption of Motif by the UNIX workstation vendors, ICS was the leading independent supplier of the Motif toolkit. In 1998, The Open Group chose ICS to provide technical support for its Motif source code licenses.

Today, ICS’ Builder Xcessory PRO (BX PRO) is the market leader in Motif graphical user interface development tools. 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 for the Best New Application for Software Development by The Linux Journal. Commenting on the importance of this alliance, The Linux Journal described the software as “?the first Visual C/C++ equivalent for Linux.”

ICS sponsors the MotifZone (http://www.motifzone.net.), a community site for Motif developers to gather additional knowledge and request input on technical problems from other engineers. The MotifZone also hosts the Public CVS source code repository for Open Motif as well as the defect database.

Contact:

Mark Hatch
Integrated Computer Solutions
mhatch@ics.com
617-621-0060 x108

###Builder Xcessory and BX PRO are trademarks of Integrated Computer Solutions. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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