Ion (window manager)

Last updated
Ion
Developer(s) Tuomo Valkonen [1] [2]
Operating system Unix-like
Type Window Manager
License LGPL-2.1-only with naming restrictions
Website tuomov.iki.fi/software/ion/

In Unix computing, Ion is a tiling and tabbing window manager for the X Window System. It is designed such that it is possible to manage windows using only a keyboard, without needing a mouse. It is the successor of PWM and is written by the same author, Tuomo Valkonen. [1] [2] Since the first release of Ion in the summer 2000, similar alternative window management ideas have begun to show in other new window managers: Larswm, ratpoison, StumpWM, wmii, xmonad and dwm.

Contents

First versions of Ion were released under the Artistic License, Ion2 and the development versions of Ion3 were released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). However, the first release candidate of Ion3 included a license change to a custom license based on the LGPL (specifically modified versions must not use the name ion). [3]

Since version 2, Ion has been scriptable in Lua. [1] [2]

As of September 17, 2009, Valkonen states he is unlikely to continue development of Ion by himself. [4]

The official home page went offline in early 2010.[ citation needed ]

A fork, Notion (Not-ion), is being maintained.

Alternatives

The Notion (Not-ion) fork is actively maintained with packages available for the Linux distributions gentoo, Debian, Arch, SUSE and Fedora as well as NetBSD and Solaris (Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana).

Window managers similar to ion include awesome, dwm, i3, larswm, and xmonad.

Controversy

Tuomo Valkonen, the author of Ion, has been at the center of several controversies concerning the licensing and distribution of his software, in particular the proclivity of major Linux and BSD distributions of making outdated development versions of Ion3 (the current unstable development branch) available as part of "frozen" software repositories. Often, such versions will include patches, such as for Xinerama or Xft support, both of which Valkonen disapproves on professional and personal grounds and has had removed from the main source tree. Yet, such distribution would seem to imply that the patched version is the official Ion3 package maintained by Valkonen himself, which he sees as unacceptable. Valkonen has even recently[ when? ] become an outspoken critic of the entire free software and open-source movement (the "FOSS herd", as he refers to it) [5] due to his perceived mistreatment at the hands of several major distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, pkgsrc (NetBSD, DragonflyBSD), and FreeBSD.[ citation needed ]

On April 28, 2007, Valkonen warned the Arch Linux maintainers of possible legal action because the (unofficial) Arch User Repository contained scripts to install Ion3 with patches he did not approve of. [6] Later on he did the same with the pkgsrc maintainer of the NetBSD project [7] and the ports maintainer of the FreeBSD project. [8] As of December 12, 2007, [9] the development branch of Ion, along with other software by Valkonen, was pulled [10] from the FreeBSD ports tree, after the author filed a complaint about outdated development releases still being available. Any version of Ion may still be installed from source code on any Unix system with proper libraries and dependencies.

Valkonen has implied in several mailing lists that he has become completely disillusioned with, if not openly hostile toward, the free software community in general. He plans to switch to developing strictly closed-source software for the Windows platform in the future. [11] As of 2018, the author claims to have "found more worthwhile hobbies" than programming for the "Free Software movement", opining that it amounts to "bug-ridden clone[s] ... with a centralised software distribution mechanism". [12] Borgend, Valkonen's latest published program as of 2018, remains open-source and is compatible with Unix-like systems, including Macintosh OS X, his present operating system of choice.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Common Desktop Environment</span> Desktop environment for Unix, Unix-like, and OpenVMS operating systems

The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU</span> Free software collection

GNU is an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operating systems popularly known as Linux. Most of GNU is licensed under the GNU Project's own General Public License (GPL).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blackbox</span> Free and open-source stacking window manager for the X Window System

Blackbox is a free and open-source stacking window manager for the X Window System.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is a reference describing the conventions used for the layout of Unix-like systems. It has been made popular by its use in Linux distributions, but it is used by other Unix-like systems as well. It is maintained by the Linux Foundation. The latest version is 3.0, released on 3 June 2015.

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project implementation of the C standard library. It provides a wrapper around the system calls of the Linux kernel and other kernels for application use. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++. It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MirOS BSD</span> Operating system

MirOS BSD is a free and open source operating system which started as a fork of OpenBSD 3.1 in August 2002. It was intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD with better support for European localisation. Since then it has also incorporated code from other free BSD descendants, including NetBSD, MicroBSD and FreeBSD. Code from MirOS BSD was also incorporated into ekkoBSD, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up working on MirOS BSD for a while.

pkgsrc Package manager for Unix-like operating systems

pkgsrc is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 1999, support for Solaris was added, followed by support for other operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tiling window manager</span> Window manager with non-overlapping frames

In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with the organization of the screen often dependant on mathematical formulas to organise the windows into a non-overlapping frame. This is opposed to the more common approach used by stacking window managers, which allow the user to drag windows around, instead of windows snapping into a position. This allows for a different style of organization, although it strays from the traditional desktop metaphor.

BioLinux is a term used in a variety of projects involved in making access to bioinformatics software on a Linux platform easier using one or more of the following methods:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux</span> Family of Unix-like operating systems

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project.

dwm Dynamic window manager for X Window System

dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally much simpler. dwm is written purely in C for performance and lacks any configuration interface besides editing the source code. One of the project's guidelines is that the source code is intended never to exceed 2000 SLOC, and options meant to be user-configurable are all contained in a single header file.

GNU variants are operating systems based upon the GNU operating system. According to the GNU project and others, these also include most operating systems using the Linux kernel and a few others using BSD-based kernels.

xmonad Dynamic window manager for X Window System

xmonad is a dynamic window manager (tiling) for the X Window System, noted for being written in the functional programming language Haskell.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WeeChat</span> IRC client

WeeChat is a free and open-source Internet Relay Chat client that is designed to be light and fast. It is released under the terms of the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later and has been developed since 2003.

awesome (window manager) Window manager for X Window System

awesome is a dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages. Lua is also used for configuring and extending the window manager. Its development began as a fork of dwm, though has differed considerably since. It aims to be extremely small and fast, yet extensively customizable. It makes it possible for the user to manage windows with the use of keyboard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenZFS</span> Open-source implementation of the ZFS file system

OpenZFS is an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager initially developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system, and is now maintained by the OpenZFS Project. Similar to the original ZFS, the implementation supports features like data compression, data deduplication, copy-on-write clones, snapshots, RAID-Z, and virtual devices that can create filesystems that span multiple disks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lumina (desktop environment)</span> Desktop environment for X Window System

Lumina Desktop Environment, or simply Lumina, is a plugin-based desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was designed specifically as a system interface for TrueOS and systems derived from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) in general, but it has been ported to various Linux distributions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Saunders, Mike (March 2008). "Lightweight window managers". Linux Format (103). UK: Future Publishing.
  2. 1 2 3 Сондерс, Майк (March 2008). Легковесные ОМ (PDF). Linux Format (in Russian) (103). Russia: Mezon.ru: 20.
  3. ↑ #422527 - ion3: New upstream release available - Debian Bug report logs
  4. ↑ Valkonen, Tuomo (September 2009), The end of the line, archived from the original on 2010-12-30, retrieved 2015-11-11
  5. ↑ Ports Mailing List, FreeBSD, December 2007.
  6. ↑ [tur-users] Ion3 trademark infringement
  7. ↑ te ch-pkg: Outdated ion3 pkgsrc in violation of the license
  8. ↑ FreeBSD Mail Archives
  9. ↑ Ion3 license violation
  10. ↑ Ion3 removal (Re: Ion3 license violation)
  11. ↑ Ion3 license violation
  12. ↑ "Software ∈ ~tuomov".

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.