Bellcore MGR Windows Manager to FreeBSD?

[Mikael Cardell]

Forrest Aldrich <forrie at forrie.com> writes:

> Curious if anyone knows of a port of the free (and compact) Bellcore
> MGR window manager to FreeBSD.  I seem to recall hearing it was
> ported to FreeBSD-2.x, but that was quite some time ago.

True. It was ported. That port still sort of works.

> It was originally a free replacement for the old UNIX-PC wmgr
> system.

I was under the impression that Stephen Uhler developed it as a
lightweight alternative to SunView on Sun 3 systems. The original MGR
from Bellcore had nothing to do with PCs what so ever.

I first met MGR on Sun 3/50s and 3/60s with very little RAM where it
was really nice.

Since then, it has been ported to many platforms, including the
PC. There is support for at least some common graphics hardware, but
I've only tried it at VGA resolutions on PCs, but I used it on bwtwo
framebuffers at 1152x900 daily for quite a while on Sun 3 systems and
my SPARCstation ELC, some years ago. 

I also ported MGR from SunOS to Solaris and Linux/SPARC.

Some remains of my efforts are still at:

  http://hack.org/~mc/mgr/

There are some source tar balls available.

I have already answered in personal mail, since Forrest wrote directly
to me as well, since I tried to maintain MGR for a while, but when I
found his post here, I think the answer I sent to him might be of
interest to others as well.

This is what I wrote directly to Forrest:

  I'm sorry for the delay. I've been away for a few days. What lists did
  you ask on? I'm subscribed to many of the freebsd-* lists myself, but
  haven't had a chance to catch up yet.

[But now I have, as you can see.]

  To answer your question, I got an unpatched MGR 0.69 (the last
  distribution from Michael Hardt) to compile on my Thinkpad running
  FreeBSD 4.7 with not too much work last year. I can start it, but
  there's something wrong with the mouse routines. It does, however,
  show the splash screen and the initial root window. Of course, it only
  runs in the supported VGA modes, so it ran on 640x480x2 on my machine.

  I don't quite remember what I did, but I think it may have involved
  some dependencies on include files.

  Have you tried compiling it yourself?

  If you really want to hack MGR, I suggest you start by writing a new
  libbitblit, so you can support more modern graphics hardware. To make
  the work a little easier, you could use the vgl interface that covers
  many VESA modes or, perhaps, use the GGI projects interface or the
  Linux framebuffer mode.

  I would be interested in helping out, if I find the time. Please tell
  me what you think.

  MC