Motif - The GUI for Unix Systems

Motif Availability

1. Start downloading the OpenMotif toolkit for the platform of your choice.

2. While OpenMotif is downloading register for an instant download of the Motif GUI Builder used by the top GUI developers in the world and try it for free for 30 days.

3. Download all the Motif programming reference books you'll ever need.

Note: There are no plans to build Motif for later versions of MAC OS X or FreeBSD.
Source Code is provided, here, so you can build Motif for yourself if you wish.

Step 1 - Download OpenMotif

OpenMotif at any version is only available under the terms of the Open Group license:

See the notes on Motif below

In order to ensure that you are prompted to save the file, you may have to right click on the file name and then select 'Save link as', or similar.

You should verify the MD5 signature on the files, which can be viewed by clicking on the 'MD5' link. A unix program called md5 or md5sum is included in many unix distributions. It is also available as part of GNU Textutils. Windows users can use Microsoft's File Checksum Integrity Verifier (FCIV) program obtainable from here, or a third party binary md5 program from here, here, or here.

Step 2 - Get a Motif GUI Builder

Download a copy of X-Designer to go with your OpenMotif toolkit. Try it for free for 30 days and find out why X-Designer is the #1 choice of GUI development professionals worldwide. Click here to register and download.

Step 3 - Download the Motif Books

O'Reilly publish a series of books in a set called 'The Definitive Guides to the X Window System' which include:

Volume 6A - the Motif Programming Manual

Volume 6B - the Motif Reference Manual.

Both these books are for Motif 2.1 and are available for download as PDF files under the terms of the Open Publication license.

Notes on Motif

See The Motif overview page for more details.

Visit motifdeveloper.com, originally derived from MW3: Motif on the World Wide Web - a valuable source of X/Motif information.

Releases

There are five main releases of OpenMotif available here:

OpenMotif 2.1.30	Binary Packages Release 1 (May 17, 2000)
OpenMotif 2.1.31	Binary Packages Release 2 (April 26, 2004)
OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.31	Binary Packages Release 3 (September 26, 2004)
OpenMotif 2.1.32	Binary Packages Release 4 (August 5, 2005)
OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.32	Binary Packages Release 5 (November 9, 2007)
OpenMotif 2.1.32 32-bit & 64-bit	Rebuilt in mid-November 2007
OpenMotif 2.1.32 32-bit & 64-bit	Repackaged for Debian dpkg (.deb) in February 2010

You can view the list of the changes to OpenMotif 2.1.31 from OpenMotif 2.1.30 and the changes to OpenMotif 2.1.32 from OpenMotif 2.1.31 by clicking here.

Note that OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.31 is OpenMotif 2.1.31 with its data structures padded to make it binary compatible with OpenMotif 2.2 and 2.3. Similarly for OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.32.

System Requirements for Linux

There are several versions of OpenMotif for Linux - please ensure that you pick the most suitable one for your system.

The Linux OpenMotif 2.1.30 package was built on RedHat Linux 6.1 (Linux 2.2.12-20) and is thus suitable for that or a compatible Linux system.

There are three packages for Linux OpenMotif 2.1.31:

one built on RedHat Linux 7.3 (Linux 2.4.18-27)

one built on RedHat Linux 9 (Linux 2.4.20-18.9)

one built on Sun JDS2003 Linux (Linux 2.4.19)

Note that the version built on Sun's JDS2003 Linux has been tested on Sun JDS2003, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 (WS, AS and ES).

OpenMotif 2.1.32 was built on RedHat Linux 9 (Linux 2.4.20-18.9) and SuSE 9.2 (Linux 2.6.5) in both 32 and 64 bit modes. The SuSE 9.2 versions are known to work on Redhat 9, Redhat Enterprise 4EL, Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora Core 6 and will almost certainly be suitable for other versions of Linux incorporating version 2.6.5 or later of the kernel.

Currently we have no plans to release Motif for later versions of Linux, if you require OpenMotif 2.1.32 for a different version of Linux then please contact us by using our enquiry form or otherwise.

System Requirements for MAC OS X

There are four versions of the package. The ones built on MAC OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and MAC OS X 10.3 (Panther) are PowerPC libraries. The later libraries, for MAC OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and MAC OS X 10.5 (Leopard) are Universal builds. Note that the Leopard build also contains a 64 bit Intel section.

Apple transitioned their X11 platform from XFree86 to X.org at 10.5 (Leopard). X11 applications built on 10.4 (Tiger), or earlier, may need to be recompiled.

Please ensure that you select the correct version.

Note that these versions are for old versions of MAC OS X - they may not run on other versions.
There are no plans to build Motif for later versions of MAC OS X, but Source Code is provided, here, so you can build Motif for yourself if you wish

System Requirements for FreeBSD

The FreeBSD OpenMotif 2.1.30 package was built on FreeBSD 3.4. OpenMotif 2.1.31 is currently not available for FreeBSD and there are no plans to build Motif on later versions of FreeBSD. If this is a problem please contact us by using our enquiry form or otherwise.

Developers on FreeBSD will need the glibc wide character support routines that are not otherwise available on FreeBSD. They are not required if you are only interested in the runtime parts of the distribution.

Package Content

There is one package for each platform, containing what is often referred to as runtime and development software.

Each package contains the Motif static and shared libraries, Motif window manager (mwm), UIL Compiler (uil), Motif support files, executable demo programs, and the header files needed to compile Motif programs from source code.

Installation Instructions

To install the packages, use the following commands as appropriate:

Linux:	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.30-1_IST.i386.rpm
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.31-2_IST.redhat73.i386.rpm
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.31-2_IST.redhat9.i386.rpm
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.31-2_IST-JDS2003.i386.rpm
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.32-1_IST.redhat9.i386.rpm
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.32-2_IST.i586.rpm
	dpkg -i openmotif-2.1.32-2_IST.i586.deb
	rpm -ivh openmotif-2.1.32-2_IST.x86_64.rpm
	dpkg -i openmotif-2.1.32-2_IST.x86_64.deb
FreeBSD:	pkg_add openmotif-2.1.30-1_IST.tgz
MAC OS X:	Double-click on the .dmg file

The packages will be installed into the bin, lib and include sub-directories of the following directories:

OpenMotif 2.1.30 will be installed in /usr/X11R6

OpenMotif 2.1.31 will be installed in /usr/OpenMotif-2.1.31

OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.31 will be installed in /usr/OpenMotif-2.1.31-22i which will be linked to /usr/OpenMotif

OpenMotif 2.1.32 will be installed in /usr/OpenMotif-2.1.32 and the SuSE built versions will be linked to /usr/OpenMotif

Installation of the later builds of OpenMotif will create a link from /usr/OpenMotif to the installation directory.

The location can be overridden for Linux by using the --relocate option of rpm or the --instdir= option of dpkg. If you do this then you should check that the link to /usr/OpenMotif has been made - you may have to manually set it.

The 64-bit version has 64-bit binaries in its bin directory, 32-bit libraries in its lib directory and 64-bit libraries in its lib64 directory.

On Linux and FreeBSD you will need to add the lib path to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. You should also run ldconfig to update the shared library cache.

On MAC OS X you will need to add the lib path to the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

You may get the following conflict or similar when you try to install on Linux:

file /usr/X11R6/bin/mkdirhier from install of openmotif-2.1.30-1_IST conflicts with file from package XFree86-3.3.6-20

You can safely ignore this and force the installation (use the --force flag on the rpm command line).

You may also have to use the --nodeps flag on the rpm command line or the --force-depends and/or --force-bad-version when using dpkg.

WARNING - if you have OpenMotif 2.2 installed AND you have automatic updates for Linux enabled, you will need to ensure that OpenMotif is excluded from the list of allowable updates otherwise OpenMotif 2.1 will be deleted by the update process.

Source Code

The Source Code for OpenMotif is available under the terms of the Open Group license:

The Source Code for OpenMotif 2.1.30 is available from The Open Group.

The Source Code for OpenMotif 2.1.31 is available here:

Download openmotif-2.1.31_IST.source.tar.gz   (MD5)
Note that this file is 17551059 Bytes (16.7MB) which is 74.0MB when uncompressed

Uncompress and unpack the tar archive, which will create a directory called motif

Read the file motif/RELNOTES

The Source Code for OpenMotif-Compat 2.1.31 is available here:

Download openmotif-compat-2.1.31_IST.source.tar.gz   (MD5)
Note that this file is 17569329 Bytes (16.7MB) which is 74.0MB when uncompressed

Uncompress and unpack the tar archive, which will create a directory called motif

Read the files motif/RELNOTES, motif/README.compat and motif/README.macosx.

Note: You must use one of the OpenMotif-Compat versions for MAC OS X.

The Source Code for OpenMotif 2.1.32 is available here:

Download openmotif-2.1.32_IST.source.tar.gz   (MD5)
Note that this file is 17575123 Bytes (16.7MB) which is 74.0MB when uncompressed

Uncompress and unpack the tar archive, which will create a directory called motif

Read the file motif/RELNOTES

OpenMotif 2.2 and 2.3

Please note that the OpenMotif (2.2 or 2.3) distribution that is supplied with many Linux distributions has been classified as 'experimental' by the Open Group. IST would recommend that you do not use OpenMotif 2.2 or 2.3. For more details about the problems with OpenMotif 2.2 which have not been corrected in 2.3, please see the web page: http://www.motifdeveloper.com/tips/tip22.html

Feedback

We are always interested any feedback you may have. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or wish to report a problem please contact us by using our Problem Reporting Form or enquiry form or otherwise.