If you install EMWM and the goodies from the author's page you can get a very close
system. Also, some guy at Nixers.net it's trying to recreate the whole Irix interface under EMWM.
For the X11 books, current X.org manuals are easily found under X.org docs and they will work nealy the same. Now they promote xcb instead of xlib but xlib itself still works.
You'll might (not sure) need:
- Xmu.pdf XMU, low level
- intrinsics.pdf X11 inners, useful to debug X11 stuff
- icccm.pdf Basically window manager standards
- libXaw.pdf Athena/X11, if you need something lighter than Motif
For instance, you can create some MPV frontend with XEmbed and Motif. MPV can be controlled by sending commands to a socket, and creating a GUI for it can be first prototyped with TCL/Tk and then done with MPV.
That, and it's been developed in fits and starts. There was like a year where the primary (and AFAICT only) developer lost access to the domain name he was using.
I had this installed on an old X220 running Fedora and it was fun, but I wouldn't dare run it on anything that I needed to work day in and day out.
Irix did have a very nice and flashy desktop, but compared to bsd or even linux the underlying unix system was... a bit off. and I don't think this was just familiarity with bsd, solaris felt the same way.
I think it is the dynamic pressure of a commercial closed source unix vs a community source available unix, where the commercial unix is pressured to maintain compatibility and thus also maintains a ton of old footguns. The community unix allows itself to file them smooth and become more ergonomic over time. At the cost of being incompatible. However compatibility is not as much as an issue because you have the source for most of your programs, it is much easier to adapt to incompatible changes.
