Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Octane / CD Drive / IRIX Disks ?

Good day everyone,

i just fulfilled myself a childhoods dream and bought a beautiful Octane Workstation on ebay.
Back in the days when i was a little nerd kid my father sometimes brought one of those "sgi PERFORMER" Magazines home from work. I LOVED this magazine and the mysterious, colorfull computers in it... even though i never really knew what to do with those machines, but what i knew was that they had to be VERY fast and powerfull. Some years later i did an internship for a 3d animation studio and finally got to work on some sgi systems! Boy i can tell you that was an absolute great experience, i was the luckiest 15 year old boy on earth that time. OK enough with emotional stuff here.

Surprisingly my new Octane came with a bunch of really great preinstalled Software like Maya, Smoke, Inferno and some other Discreet Legacy products.
But the IRIX Version is a plain 6.5 without any overlays. Not even the NFS Subsystem is installed. Of course i would love to get some nekoware running, but i know that i need at least IRIX 6.5.2 to run nekoware stuff.

One Question:

1. i would need a cd drom drive to connect to my octane. Any suggestions about that? Is there a list with compatible scsi cd drom drives for octane anywhere?

thanx in advance!
and sorry for my poor english. :?

edit: oops. Sorry, i edited my posting. Makes my posting a bit obsolete now, but its better to not start off with trouble here :)

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
Nedry wrote:
Good day everyone,

i just fulfilled myself a childhoods dream and bought a beautiful Octane Workstation on ebay.
Back in the days when i was a little nerd kid my father sometimes brought one of those "sgi PERFORMER" Magazines home from work. I LOVED this magazine and the mysterious, colorfull computers in it... even though i never really knew what to do with those machines, but what i knew was that they had to be VERY fast and powerfull. Some years later i did an internship for a 3d animation studio and finally got to work on some sgi systems! Boy i can tell you that was an absolute great experience, i was the luckiest 15 year old boy on earth that time. OK enough with emotional stuff here.

Surprisingly my new Octane came with a bunch of really great preinstalled Software like Maya, Smoke, Inferno and some other Discreet Legacy products.
But the IRIX Version is a plain 6.5 without any overlays. Not even the NFS Subsystem is installed. Of course i would love to get some nekoware running, but i know that i need at least IRIX 6.5.2 to run nekoware stuff.

You need 6.5.22 or later for nekoware.
Nedry wrote:
I searched the internet for hours to find out where i could get IRIX CD´s with 6.5.30 Overlays but didnt find anything. Theres some stuff on ebay but they want 150 - 250 € for original IRIX cd´s. Thats a bit TOO expensive.

2 Questions:

1. Where or how can i get IRIX 6.5.30. I made a supportfolio account but the important stuff over there is for members with a valid support account only.
2. If i would finally find original IRIX CD´s i would need a cd drom drive to connect to my octane. Any suggestions about that? Is there a list with compatible scsi cd drom drives for octane anywhere?

thanx in advance!
and sorry for my poor english. :?


Careful...

at the top of the page it is wrote:
Forum rules

Any posts concerning pirated software or offering to buy/sell/trade commercial software are subject to removal.


I guess almost any external SCSI enclosure will do and most SCSI CD-ROM (I've tried) drives will do and I've got like a dozen different makes of SCSI CDRW, SCSI DVD, SCSI CD, SCSI Tape including DAT and VHS tape backup. I think you might want to be able to set the 512 byte blocks jumper if you want to boot from it otherwise I've not had anything refuse to talk that wasn't actually broken...

The other option is network install, or ftp, scp, etc..

R.

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If you can find a way to upgrade to (at least) 6.5.3, you can download the 6.5.22 overlays for free with your Supportfolio account. Not sure if SGI will still sell you the 6.5.3 overlays or not, but my guess would be probably not...

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Project:
Movin' on up, toooo the east side
Plan:
World domination! Or something...
@Nedry - Welcome to nekochan, and thanks for retooling your initial post into compliance with forum rules.

I'd recommend cloning your current hard drive so you have a plug-n-play recovery mechanism should your current disk bite the dust (or as a new user you inadvertently fubar it beyond redemption). There are a couple of good tutorials that'll walk you through cloning your IRIX system disk; there's one in the neko-wiki , I've successfully used the one on Ian Mapleson's site numerous times - but my currently my preferred method is BetXen's commented cloning script - the as-you-progress comments in the script pretty much walk you through the cloning process.

As far as SCSI CD drives go, there's several listed in the Octane Hardware Aggregator . You'll also find a few SCSI CDRW and DVD-ROM drives. I use a Pioneer DVD-305s slot-loader, which works fine as an IRIX install drive, and supports audio playback via the SCSI bus.

BTW, if you contact SGI to inquire about an IRIX 6.5.x CD set, it's worth noting that not all IRIX install sets were created equally. There are full install-from-scratch CD libraries (usually 10 or more disks), and Overlay install sets that are intended to upgrade an existing install, but can't be used as is to create a working install (or add stuff like NFS if it isn't already installed on your system). Overlay sets typically have less than 5 CDs.

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***********************************************************************
Welcome to ARMLand - 0/0x0d00
running...(sherwood-root 0607201829)
* InfiniteReality/Reality Software, IRIX 6.5 Release *
***********************************************************************
@recondas: thankx for the advice. I will do so.
I contacted sgi asking if theres any possibility to get irix 6.5.30. No answer yet but everything i found out so far is that it is impossible to get anything from sgi without a support contract.

@vishnu: you mean the IRIX 6.5.22 Maintenance Release?
you are right, sgi still offers it as a free download at the supportfolio, gonna update my octane to .22 the next days.

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
Overlays for for various versions of IRIX 6.5.x pop up fairly commonly on Ebay, and as I mentioned if you can get to 6.5.3 (or above) the upgrade to 6.5.22 is free from Supportfolio. And once you're at 6.5.22 there are many who would argue that going higher is actually a downgrade as opposed to an upgrade. Which is to say, 6.5.23 and above is arguably a case of "spoiled broth."

_________________
Project:
Movin' on up, toooo the east side
Plan:
World domination! Or something...
damn it, i just read some more old threads here about overlays and updating... seems like i will get some trouble if i try to update from 6.5. directly to 6.5.22.
Just as vishnu mentioned before i have to get at least 6.5.3 first.

im searching ebay like crazy since i got my octane, but theres not much going on with irix media at the moment. Just some silly offerings like this one:
http://tinyurl.com/kjasah8

yeah, right... 150 Euros for 13 years old used software.

nevertheless, thank you very much for your tips and tricks!!!

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
Before you spend large amounts of cash it might be a good time to double check your hardware inventory and the version of IRIX currently installed.

Could you run the following commands and post the output here?
Code:
uname -aR
Code:
hinv -vm
BTW, on the odd chance you don't already know, enclosing the output of those commands in "code blocks" will preserve the original formatting. As an example the commands posted above are in code blocks - hovering your cursor over the "Code" button at the top of the 'Post a Reply' page will give a fully visible example of the necessary formatting.

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***********************************************************************
Welcome to ARMLand - 0/0x0d00
running...(sherwood-root 0607201829)
* InfiniteReality/Reality Software, IRIX 6.5 Release *
***********************************************************************
aaahh, ok. I allways just did uname -r. Uname -R now gives me a bit more information. Thanx again :D

it says: 6.5.9f
Can i install 6.5.22 straight onto my 6.5.9 ?
If so i will give it a try this weekend.

i cant paste any hinv or uname data here because i cant access nekochan with the shitty netscape on the octane. I tried to install Mozilla a few days ago but there were so many dependencies and missing libraries that i gave up on that.
Any other ideas how i could manage to transfer the hinv output to my macbook?

edit: i gave it another try with mozilla from the sgi freeware page and managed to fix all dependencies. Installation went fine but when i try to run mozilla from the terminal as root it says permission denied. The run-mozilla shell script spits out some error messages i dont understand.

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
To upgrade to 6.5.22 from versions prior to 6.5.19 using the overlay, you need to update swmgr. I think patch 5089 will still work on 6.5.9, but I am not sure.

However, the sgi freeware Mozilla should definitely work. Where's your mozilla binary parked? Are the execute bits correct on it?

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smit happens.

:Fuel: bigred , 700MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12, 6.5.30
:Indy: indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
probably posted from Image bruce , 2x2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 8GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...
ClassicHasClass wrote:
To upgrade to 6.5.22 from versions prior to 6.5.19 using the overlay, you need to update swmgr. I think patch 5089 will still work on 6.5.9, but I am not sure.


It's patch 5086 you need to apply before the .22 overlay.

Code:
1.  Patch_SG0005086_Release_Note

This release note describes patch SG0005086 to IRIX
6.5/6.5SE and 6.5.1 to 6.5.20 inclusive.

This patch contains the IRIX 6.5.21 versions of the
installation tools inst, swmgr, showfiles and showprods.
Therefore, IRIX 6.5.21 itself will replace this patch.

If you are using the "live installation" method to upgrade
from any 6.5-based release prior to 6.5.21 to another from
6.5.21 onwards, you must first install this patch to enable
inst to handle certain additions to the format of the
distribution images.  If you have 6.5.21 installed on your
system, the required changes are already contained in inst.
Alternatively, a "miniroot install" will allow you to
install versions from 6.5.21 onwards without any patching.
You should be sure to use the miniroot contained in the
distribution to which you are upgrading.

...

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Yep, im allready running swmgr 4.1. I installed the patch few days ago in my irresistible enthusiasm. Seems to work fine with 6.5.9.

Quote:
However, the sgi freeware Mozilla should definitely work. Where's your mozilla binary parked? Are the execute bits correct on it?


I am at work right now but as far as i remember the location of the installed mozilla was: usr/freeware/mozilla
i had to search for it via find since i had no idea where the files could be located after installing.
As you can see im still quite foolish with irix. Laboriously the squirrel lives.

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
i finally had some time this weekend and managed to update my octane to 6.5.22.
AND finally got neko_firefox 2.0 running. Yay!

Now that i can access nekochan from my octane i can finally post some hinv here.

Code:
1 300 MHZ IP30 Processor
CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.3
FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
Main memory size: 1024 Mbytes
Xbow ASIC: Revision 1.4
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty1
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty2
IOC3 parallel port: plp1
Graphics board: ESI
Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2
Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1

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We call things we don't understand complex, but that means we haven't found a good way of thinking about them.
Very nice, but stick it in the actual SGI: hinv forum where it will be noticed and appreciated. :)

_________________
smit happens.

:Fuel: bigred , 700MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12, 6.5.30
:Indy: indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
probably posted from Image bruce , 2x2x2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 8GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...