Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

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

You need 6.5.22 or later for nekoware.


Careful...



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.

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...

@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.

@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.

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."

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!!!

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?
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.

aaahh, ok. I allways just did uname -r. Uname -R now gives me a bit more information. Thanx again

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.

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?

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

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.



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.

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.

Very nice, but stick it in the actual SGI: hinv forum where it will be noticed and appreciated.