Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Hi guys,

I've wanted an SGI machine for years, pretty much any would do, but being based in New Zealand they don't crop up very often and shipping from overseas would be a killer, so I'd pretty much given up on the whole thing when suddenly I've inherited three of them! A friend who works at a post production studio said they were getting rid of some old SGI hosts that had been sitting in storage for years so I grabbed the lot site unseen.

I now have two O2s, one a 300MHz R5000 with 384MB RAM and the other a 180MHz with 128MB RAM. The faster one also comes with an SW1600 and an extra NIC. I also got an Octane though as I don't have a 13w3 adapter yet I can't actually fire it up and see what it's loaded with. They also had an Onyx2 sitting there but apparently someone else had claimed it (which is probably for the best as I doubt I'd fire it up very often, maybe only on a cold winter day )

I'm pretty stoked that both O2s boot and even the clock batteries held charge as the date was correct! I'm now just playing around in Irix while I decide what to do with them (I wrangle Linux servers for a day job so I"m certainly comfortable working in the shell, though old school Unix does trip me up sometimes with some of the differences).

Anyway, just a quick hello and expect a bunch of questions from me moving forward as I try to get things working on them!

Cheers,
Andrew

Welcome! O2s are great machines and nice to hear your have the 1600SW also. They look great together!

welcome llama, seems you're set up quite well already
using a "real" unix should also be something you can benefit from for your job as it lacks most of the dummy features most linux version come with.

Another country heard from, top notch! Thanks for joining the fold, good luck with your double-Os and your SOG-less Octane...

Welcome!

Thanks for the welcome guys!

Took a bit to get networking up and running as I'd like but all sorted now. I think the first order of business will be to get nekoware up and running so I can get some software installed (as fun as it is to surf the internet like it's 1998 in Netscape a browser that actually knows what css/javascript is would be good!). I'm also still trying to work out which shell to use - I always used bash traditionally (as that was what most Linux distros and OS X use) but I've had to add a bunch of things to my .profile to get things like ctrl-c working as I'd expect them too (break the current running command). Is there a way to get csh to source ~/.profile or am I better off switching shells? Also need some basic things like a music player, video player etc as I can't really *do* much with it in its current state.

Otherwise it's kinda fun messing about on the o2 - that SW1600 is actually a really nice screen considering the age of it! nice and crisp, though it's been a while since I used a system that didn't have anti-aliased fonts. All adds to the old school charm

Ideally I"d like to do a fresh install as there is a lot of cruft and the hard drive is only 2GB (I've got a 9GB drive too which would give me a bit more room) but it didn't come with any media unfortunately so that's the next thing to track down. Failing that would I be able to do something like dd the 2GB install on to the 9GB drive? Is there anything else needed to get it to boot off it?

Cheers,
Andrew

llama wrote: Is there a way to get csh to source ~/.profile

no and it wouldn't work either. csh doesn't eat ksh stuff let alone specific extras like bash comes with.

or am I better off switching shells?

indeed, nobody needs bash. if you want it fancy use zsh and if you want it solid use tcsh. that btw does not only apply to irix but any unix.

Also need some basic things like a music player, video player

that might get difficult. for music xmms is a great thing but video is tricky. at least assuming you wanna play videos using "modern" codecs such as xvid or x264.

it's been a while since I used a system that didn't have anti-aliased fonts

late irix versions did come with anti aliased fonts and so do gtk2 based programs

would I be able to do something like dd the 2GB install on to the 9GB drive? Is there anything else needed to get it to boot off it?

search ftw:
viewtopic.php?p=35760#p35760

llama wrote: (as fun as it is to surf the internet like it's 1998 in Netscape a browser that actually knows what css/javascript is would be good!).

Maybe I can save you a little time and effort .... with an O2-300 don't even bother to try Fireflop 3. Flop 2 was usable but v ... e ... r ... y s ... l ... o ... w. As in, watch it draw the page in stripes. See the pixels change as the page gets drawn ! Plus 2 is just as bad for browsing now as Netcrap 3, many pages display as a stripe down the middle of the window. Ain't the innernet fun ?

I speak from experience on this subject, had an O2-350 at home for a couple years.

You might try Dillo.

For music, I've used mxaudio for years and am very happy with it.

I always used bash traditionally (as that was what most Linux distros and OS X use)

This stuff is bleeding over into the rest of the world ... for ages I couldn't figure out why gunzip on the Sun wouldn't work. Finally took a look at the "executable" and discovered it was a fricking bash wrapper script. OpenCSW, bunch of total idiots. Solaris != Linux. Nitwits

hamei wrote: Maybe I can save you a little time and effort .... with an O2-300 don't even bother to try Fireflop 3. Flop 2 was usable but v ... e ... r ... y s ... l ... o ... w. As in, watch it draw the page in stripes. See the pixels change as the page gets drawn ! Plus 2 is just as bad for browsing now as Netcrap 3, many pages display as a stripe down the middle of the window. Ain't the innernet fun ?

I speak from experience on this subject, had an O2-350 at home for a couple years.

You might try Dillo.

Yeah I've read about the performance of browsing on the o2 - still, I'll take a slow site that renders over one that doesn't load at all. It's more for playing around with anyway at this stage - hopefully once I get the Octane fired up it will be a little better (but I'm still not holding my breath there...)

For music, I've used mxaudio for years and am very happy with it.

Cool, I'll check it out.

This stuff is bleeding over into the rest of the world ... for ages I couldn't figure out why gunzip on the Sun wouldn't work. Finally took a look at the "executable" and discovered it was a fricking bash wrapper script. OpenCSW, bunch of total idiots. Solaris != Linux. Nitwits

True, took me aaaages to work out why a comparison wasn't working in a script on Solaris (got tricked by a bash'ism).

foetz wrote: indeed, nobody needs bash. if you want it fancy use zsh and if you want it solid use tcsh. that btw does not only apply to irix but any unix.

I'm certainly not married to bash, I guess I just need to set up tcsh (or similar) properly so I have the things I'm now used to (up arrow history, tab completion with choices, ctrl-c break, etc etc). Is there a list of shells available on the system (eg an /etc/shells equivalent)? I seem to have a limited selection but I'm only eyeballing the bin directory so maybe they're stashed somewhere else?

that might get difficult. for music xmms is a great thing but video is tricky. at least assuming you wanna play videos using "modern" codecs such as xvid or x264.

Yeah I'm not likely to be watching anything too serious on the o2, that's what I have a TV for Playing music would be a great start.

late irix versions did come with anti aliased fonts and so do gtk2 based programs

Oh true, I didn't realise that. I'm pretty out of date, this machine is running 6.5.14f so a bit behind the curve. I'm not super keen to mess with it too much while I have no install media until I've got a copy of the disk somewhere safe

search ftw:
viewtopic.php?p=35760#p35760

That's perfect thanks! I'll give it a go when I get home tonight.

Thanks guys for all suggestions!

llama wrote: ... hopefully once I get the Octane fired up it will be a little better (but I'm still not holding my breath there...)

Octane should be fine. Websites render no problem under 3.0.19 on a Fuel so an Octane should be pleasant. The dumb thing just crashes and hangs forever waiting (we have slow overseas internet here.) but that's not the Octane's fault.

Yeah I'm not likely to be watching anything too serious on the o2, that's what I have a TV for

Umm, actually, that's one thing I did use the O2 for and it's fast : hooked up a dvd player to the video inputs and it works great.

The O2 is an odd duck : at some "normal" things it is incredibly slow. But just when you think it's a piece of junk, you do something weird such as video or some types of graphics and wham ! this little thing cooks !

And it's the most unreliable p.o.s. in the Universe ... but it's so cute. And the size is great and if you install a quiet fan it's almost silent .. talk about Jekyll & Hyde.

Playing music would be a great start.

It's super for that. And as a terminal and a shared CD-drive. Okay small web / mail server. Displays X nicely.

The O2 is a very strange computer. It's like a girl who's really hot in the sack but loses her car keys every five minutes and can't boil water. Half the time you can't wait to get home and play with it, the other half you want to throw it out the window.

llama wrote: I'm certainly not married to bash, I guess I just need to set up tcsh (or similar) properly so I have the things I'm now used to (up arrow history, tab completion with choices, ctrl-c break, etc etc). Is there a list of shells available on the system (eg an /etc/shells equivalent)? I seem to have a limited selection but I'm only eyeballing the bin directory so maybe they're stashed somewhere else?

if you wanna see which shells are there by default just have a look into /usr/bin and /sbin.
tcsh does cover what you listed except for tab completion with multiple choices. if that's a must you need to grab zsh from nekoware. if the nekoware zsh should cause problems because you're on 6.5.14 you can alternatively use mine for 6.2 which works fine with all 6.5.x versions.

foetz wrote:

llama wrote: I'm certainly not married to bash, I guess I just need to set up tcsh (or similar) properly so I have the things I'm now used to (up arrow history, tab completion with choices, ctrl-c break, etc etc). Is there a list of shells available on the system (eg an /etc/shells equivalent)? I seem to have a limited selection but I'm only eyeballing the bin directory so maybe they're stashed somewhere else?

if you wanna see which shells are there by default just have a look into /usr/bin and /sbin.
tcsh does cover what you listed except for tab completion with multiple choices. if that's a must you need to grab zsh from nekoware. if the nekoware zsh should cause problems because you're on 6.5.14 you can alternatively use mine for 6.2 which works fine with all 6.5.x versions.

If you don't want to go csh, then I suggest pdksh or one of the other reimplementations. I gave up zsh for ksh when an upgrade gave me a first time wizzard and haven't looked back. The one in /bin isn't much fun though.

mxaudio is quite nice for music (VERY low cpu usage) draws less than a percent on all R10k era SGI desktops I've used, and since it's xaudio, I believe the mp3 decoder is quite good. The only drawback is that it is not open source, and used to cost money so the package may be hard to obtain. They were nice though and released a free license when they shut shop. The license file I have says I may not redistribute The Software (henceforth known as The Software), so I guess I can't give it away? *eyes the yellow notice*

Welcome! XMMS is decent for music, and of course takes classic Winamp skins as well. I've ran it with no problems on several SGI machines. Couple it with a 300GB disk full of music and an O2 makes a very nice little jukebox, especially if you replace the PSU fan with a quieter one

Web browsing wise, Dillo 3 is incredibly fast, but also very basic (although better than Netscape). For simple sites, it's great, and it works well with Nekoware and Nekochan! I've actually found on my old Indigo2 that SeaMonkey is faster than Firefox and does a good job of rendering a lot of reasonably modern/complex pages (although it'll choke with very new stuff). Always bear in mind that browsing the web isn't exactly what SGIs were designed for, and that applies doubly for O2s...

duck wrote: I gave up zsh for ksh

not sure which ksh you had but ksh88 as well as ksh93 pretty much suck for interactive use and don't come even close to zsh. for scripts however it's different

foetz wrote:

duck wrote: I gave up zsh for ksh

not sure which ksh you had but ksh88 as well as ksh93 pretty much suck for interactive use and don't come even close to zsh. for scripts however it's different

pdksh (where pd equals public domain)

Trippynet wrote: Welcome! XMMS is decent for music, and of course takes classic Winamp skins as well. I've ran it with no problems on several SGI machines. Couple it with a 300GB disk full of music and an O2 makes a very nice little jukebox, especially if you replace the PSU fan with a quieter one

Web browsing wise, Dillo 3 is incredibly fast, but also very basic (although better than Netscape). For simple sites, it's great, and it works well with Nekoware and Nekochan! I've actually found on my old Indigo2 that SeaMonkey is faster than Firefox and does a good job of rendering a lot of reasonably modern/complex pages (although it'll choke with very new stuff). Always bear in mind that browsing the web isn't exactly what SGIs were designed for, and that applies doubly for O2s...

The reason for that is very simple: SeaMonkey 1.1 is Gecko 1.8.1, same as Firefox 2. Much slimmer, but more limited with respect to standards support.

duck wrote: pdksh (where pd equals public domain)

ah yup of course that's different

foetz wrote:

llama wrote: I'm certainly not married to bash, I guess I just need to set up tcsh (or similar) properly so I have the things I'm now used to (up arrow history, tab completion with choices, ctrl-c break, etc etc). Is there a list of shells available on the system (eg an /etc/shells equivalent)? I seem to have a limited selection but I'm only eyeballing the bin directory so maybe they're stashed somewhere else?

if you wanna see which shells are there by default just have a look into /usr/bin and /sbin.
tcsh does cover what you listed except for tab completion with multiple choices. if that's a must you need to grab zsh from nekoware. if the nekoware zsh should cause problems because you're on 6.5.14 you can alternatively use mine for 6.2 which works fine with all 6.5.x versions.

The inverse exercise would be to try out tsch on your mac or linux and see how it does on a machine you are already familiar with. Just something to consider.

Looks like zsh could be the go for an interactive shell - I've been using it on my Mac and I really like it.

I've also potentially tracked down some install software (I say potentially as I don't know if it is a proper install or just the overlays) from the same guy who gave me the boxes - no idea what version but I'm guessing relatively late as it came with a Tezro that another post production house bought a while ago. Apparently they have a box of SGI stuff I can have a sort through so I've got my fingers crossed. I'm trying to convince them that they no longer need the Tezro and should pass it along to me

In other news I've downloaded the 6.5.22 update from SGI so will upgrade the o2 when I get a chance, then start playing with nekoware.

Welcome and congratulations! And good luck convincing them to give up the Tezro.

Image all hard drives as soon as you can, if you haven't already. There's a chance you'll find software and/or licenses on them later that you aren't looking for now, and there's no Undo function. (I think you understand this, but I hadn't seen it said explicitly so...)

Hopefully you'll wind up with a complete media kit at some point, because one of the things I find most interesting in tinkering with any uncommon (today, at any rate) kit is how the installation and management works. IRIX != Solaris != AIX != HP/UX != Tru64 != Linux != OSX ... But they all have their interesting features and maddening quirks, and it broadens the mind to see what they all are.

Also, go look into getting a serial cable so you can scope out the Octane. Not having a working 13W3 adapter isn't the end of the line.