These are some screenshots of NeWS 1.1 running on SunOS 4.1.4 on QEMU that I took time ago.
Unfortunately QEMU SPARC decided to break again. Also, keyboard doesn't work yet (forcing me to use the SunView terminal emulator), but probably it's due to the keyboard script.
In any case, SunOS 4.1.4 comes with OpenWindows out of the box.
> Does it build today
In this form it won't, since that is missing the Sun PixRect library. And you also need the "operators.h"
file (which is in another directory...) and the "acceptconnect" function.
On comp.windows.news Usenet group and on the NeWS book is reported that a portable codebase (called REF) exists, and Sun ported it on Ultrix (on thr VAXstation) and System V. I read it included a version of PixRect called "Generic PixRect", which should be more portable.
BitSavers put on the net a tape dump of X/NeWS 2.0, and there are some differences: a different graphics library called SHAPES replacing CScript (and it needs the Ace preprocessor to build the device dependent portion of the library), a different memory allocator, support for X11 protocol, support for Folio F3 fonts, and other things.
Fortunately I found a copy of PixRect in the leaked sources of SunOS 4.1.4 , but it's not enough, since that device dependent routines must be rewritten.
I'm slowly porting NeWS 1.1 to NetBSD (since that wscons is easier to work with) as a proof of concept. I managed to execute code and grt my screen turn blue, but the current obstacle is decoding binary fonts: the OG routines fail completely on 64 bit machines, since that the original format assumes 32 bit machine words and big endian order. More work will be needed.
Weeks ago, while I was searching for NeWS related papers/material, I stumbled upon some japanese papers about a window system called GMW (Give More Windows).
It is pretty much obscure, and all I found is that was made at Kyoto University (who also made Kyoto Common LISP), and it used a virtual machine.
NeWS wasn't based on DPS. It's a full display server based on the PostScript Red Book with some extensions (canvases, lightweight processes and sync primitives, events, classes, garbage collection). This allows to write applications in this extended PostScript or in other programming languages, using a preprocessor, such as cps for C or lps for Scheme-48 and Allegro LISP, that generates PS snippets that get sent to the server.
Yes, it comes in bundle with SunOS, since that one part of it it's implemented in the kernel IIRC.
I've also been able to run NeWS 1.1 (which was before the X/NeWS merg) inside QEMU, although the keyboard input is not working (and for some reason the patch to add the Sun Type 4 breaks everything).
These are some screenshots of NeWS 1.1 running on SunOS 4.1.4 on QEMU that I took time ago. Unfortunately QEMU SPARC decided to break again. Also, keyboard doesn't work yet (forcing me to use the SunView terminal emulator), but probably it's due to the keyboard script.
In any case, SunOS 4.1.4 comes with OpenWindows out of the box.