While over the years there have been several threads here about the best version of IRIX for different platforms, in the reality of the new post-IRIX supportfolio and the complete non-availability of patches and even the 6.5.22 maintenance release from SGI, what would the brain trust here consider the 'best' version of IRIX for these machines to be?
If I were a new SGI hobbyist and I had just scored an O2 on eBay or at the flea market or on craigslist or wherever, and there was either no hard disk or a blank hard disk, what would my best IRIX option be, assuming several were available? Is it 6.5.22 since that is easily found, and thanks to the internet archive the otherwise difficult to find foundation CD's are available for new installs? Or should someone try to find something later, perhaps even 6.5.30 (even though the CD sets are expensive through eBay and probably not even available through SGI any more)? Are there advantages to 6.5.22 over 6.5.30? (I've heard a few already, but I'd like to see the knowledge pooled given the current IRIX situation, and links to SGI's site are lilkely to not be valid soon enough.......the http://www.sgi.com/products/software/irix/releases/ link, for instance, is no longer useful.
Having said that, if one wanted to get into development, has anyone set up a development environment without using the IRIX Dev Foundation and the MIPSPro compilers using any version of GCC? Specifically, in my case, writing automated tools for pulling audio from audio DATs and stuffing them into properly chunked and named WAV files? I have the compilers that came with 6.5.19 AWE but something more modern would be nice, and the GCC suite is well-tested, if not as optimized.
And I'm well aware that likely the 'best' OS option for the hardware today , if I want to do general things and not 'IRIX-y' things like pulling audio from DAT, is the latest OpenBSD, but that's not IRIX.....
If I were a new SGI hobbyist and I had just scored an O2 on eBay or at the flea market or on craigslist or wherever, and there was either no hard disk or a blank hard disk, what would my best IRIX option be, assuming several were available? Is it 6.5.22 since that is easily found, and thanks to the internet archive the otherwise difficult to find foundation CD's are available for new installs? Or should someone try to find something later, perhaps even 6.5.30 (even though the CD sets are expensive through eBay and probably not even available through SGI any more)? Are there advantages to 6.5.22 over 6.5.30? (I've heard a few already, but I'd like to see the knowledge pooled given the current IRIX situation, and links to SGI's site are lilkely to not be valid soon enough.......the http://www.sgi.com/products/software/irix/releases/ link, for instance, is no longer useful.
Having said that, if one wanted to get into development, has anyone set up a development environment without using the IRIX Dev Foundation and the MIPSPro compilers using any version of GCC? Specifically, in my case, writing automated tools for pulling audio from audio DATs and stuffing them into properly chunked and named WAV files? I have the compilers that came with 6.5.19 AWE but something more modern would be nice, and the GCC suite is well-tested, if not as optimized.
And I'm well aware that likely the 'best' OS option for the hardware today , if I want to do general things and not 'IRIX-y' things like pulling audio from DAT, is the latest OpenBSD, but that's not IRIX.....