Overview of the Blueprint Desktop

Documentation / Blueprint Desktop Help

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Overview of the Blueprint Desktop

Blueprint is a clean-room revival of the SGI IRIX Interactive Desktop. It is built from C, X11 and Motif, it uses its own widget set so that the controls look and behave the way the originals did, and every part of it is a separate program you can run, drive and observe on its own.

The pieces you will meet first:

The Toolchest, the menu strip that launches everything else.
The window manager, which draws the frames and manages the desks.
The File Manager, which shows directories as icon views.
CyLogin, the graphical login and display manager for the console seat.
CyThrough, which publishes remote X11 apps as native windows on this desk.
Cyclock, CySaver, CySetup, CyStar, and the other desk utilities.
This viewer, which shows the help you are reading now.

Every application that ships a help corpus is named on The Settings Books. Help Books in the Contents pane (left side) lists every book on disk. The www Applications page is the checklist (51 cards; Tiling is WindowManager). The author coverage table is share/cyhelp/INDEX.md.

Graphical login and display manager for the local seat (xdm replacement). Enable without a GUI, PAM, NetBSD rc.d, helpers, and troubleshooting:

cyhelp --book CyLogin --topic overview
cyhelp --book CyLogin --topic setup

Remote Apps (CyThrough)

Open published programs from a Linux, BSD, or IRIX host without a nested desktop. Setup, catalog use, CLI, and protocol:

cyhelp --book CyThrough --topic overview

The Settings Books page lists CyLogin and CyThrough near the top of the desktop programs. See The Settings Books.

Where help comes from

Every Blueprint application has a Help menu. What that menu offers is the same everywhere, so you only have to learn it once: see Getting Help.

Help text is stored as plain files under the shipped share directory. You can read them with any pager; nothing here is a database.

Overview of the Blueprint Desktop

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