Apple

Wasn't there a freeware program called IRIXconnect (ran on Macintosh) that mounted NFS drives by GUI?

Thanks for the hint ... IRIXconnect does the trick easier and faster than AutomountMaker!
It seems that somehow MacOSX does not allow remote shares to show up under a symbolic name:
as with AutomountMaker, the shares only appear with the name they have on the server.

[ edit ]another (not free, though) utility, "NFS Manager" looks promising,
though in a few minutes I didn´t find out how to mount an IRIX servers' share under a named mount point.
The window which lists directory nodes (?) mentiones this, so I guess it is possible.[/edit]

IRIXconnect does not automatically mount after boot/login, though it remembers what was mounted last.
And I guess if user name and ID matched on IRIX and MacOSX box it were possible to get write access.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to set up the user ID on a Mac manually. Got to find out.

About my wish for Santa:
In theory, there is X11 on both systems which is famed for a complete separation of a program and its GUI;
practically I never saw any application from a Mac show up on my IRIX desktop nor vice versa.
Since I have apps here that are stuck to IRIX I´d very much like them to show up on the Mac's desktop.
Did I miss something here eventually?

On 10.4 and earlier go to the NetInfo Manager (in Utilities). Haven't worked with 10.5 yet - it might be in NetInfo, or it might be in /etc/passwd (OS X is going more UNIX-y, generally speaking it's a good thing. I haven't used 10.5 because they dropped Classic, and 10.6 doesn't run on PPC.)



I'll second that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark WRT newer releases of X11 and IRIX X clients. I've had oddities on Linux/X.org 7.things, Solaris 10/Xsun, and Mac OS X X11 (although the XFree86-based X11 on 10.4 runs better than some of the other implementations).

Yep, tried me that one once ... until it got me totally confused, but I guess I´ll give it another try
I´m not going to MacOSX versions higher than 10.4 yet since I´m on G3 and G4 PPC iMacs here.


What about the other way round?
Some IRIX machines in the server vault and a decent iMac on the desktop showing IRIX' apps in XWindows ... you got me, Santa?
Not that I want you to bring me a decent 27" iMac (but if you plan to, why not) ... but some knowledge about how to do this.

Never tried it the other way around. IRIX workstations use X11R6 (for IRIX 6.x where x is greater than or equal to 2) or X11R5 for 5.3/6.0/6.1. I would have been more likely to expect a problem here, with a X client calling something in the X11R7 spec that isn't supported by the IRIX X server, but I need to try that at some point, I suppose.

Really ? It's not very difficult. I've done it a fair amount between computers running Solaris, Irix and OS/2 but never with a Mackletosh.


The trouble I've had in that direction is some errors about SGI extensions not being available on the other platform. Solaris and OS/2 showed up without a hitch on the Irix computer tho. It's not all Irix apps, just some. Perhaps if some of the people making Linux run on an O2 wanted to do something useful instead they could add those extensions to X/Free86.

In the mean time, I managed to mount XFS drives (ro) from my SGI server on the iMac using NFSManager,
in a way that these show up automatically *and* under a symbolic name (mount point) after boot. Great!
NFSManager is not freeware, though, but costs next to nothing.

All I need now is to have the user IDs on the Mac adapted to those in IRIX, I guess.

About the cross-platform X11 window display: there´s another thread around here.

just to be clear, the xfs disk was still in the sgi but you mounted it via nfs?

Yep.
Actually, it is a lxvm disk array of concatenated and mirrored xfs volumes attached to an Origin server.

I´m hoping to make it writeable through identical user IDs, so there will be an IRIX file server for both .

i see. just thought you'd have been able to read xfs with osx somehow

that'd be the click-only method
but works of course. thanks for the guide!

So, I need to do some plotting. Ideally on my mac at home (G4, OS 10.4). In this case, a pile of (X, Y) coordinates on a semi-log graph. And every occasion that I have to do this I run into the same problem: it seems that just about every program that I have to do it stinks.

When I attempted using a normal spreadsheet program (NeoOffice 2 and appleworks 5) they would refuse to take the data as (X,Y) points. Instead it would assume that each column is a data point with respect to the row number. I attempted using M$ excel 2007 (in a computer lab - thankfully I do not have my own copy), but it was highly un-cooperative. Not only did it have the above problem, but also it would do log on the Y axis, but not the X axis. Maybe it could be beat into submission, but I was not able to figure out how. It did not help that when I did a web search most of the results were for older versions of excel. Grrr...

Sometimes I use CricketGraph, which is a very old Mac program (late 80s) that does a good job for a lot of stuff. It even runs under classic on my G4! It does a great job for basic (X, Y) plots. But it does not do any log sort of plots.

Anyway, it seems like plotting is such a basic, easy, task that there should be lots of good applications out there to do it. If one exists, I would rather find and learn a good program. Hopefully one that is free/opensource, or at least does not cost much. Any suggestions?

I didn't really read your post but ... GNU plot ...? r-lanuage ....?

http://www.gnuplot.info/
http://www.r-project.org/

One or both probably work on whatever platform you need and might even be in nekoware.

I use wolfram mathematica for this and... well everything. A computer without mathematica is not much of a computer at all. I'm pretty sure the student version is under $100 I have and use version 7 on windows and also a couple classic versions for fun.

All the quants I've worked with think he (steven wolfram) is an idiot and hate mathematica.
I think the OP also said free or open source or mac or something.

I dunno, I like it. There's a bunch of similar programs out there so use what you are familiar with. If you are a college student it is (or at least used to be...) possible to get enough discounts and promotions so it is free.

Anyway, the OP also said he had access to a computer lab. Surely they have some sort of math system (maple, matlab, etc) and if you are lucky they will even be able to show you how to use it. Nothing good will come out of using excel; even if you get it to work right it will still look like crap.

Ah, the classic Maple vs Mathmatica vs the not yet mentioned Matlab debate. I do indeed have access to these via a computer lab. I keep thinking that I should learn how to use them, but have not yet felt like taking the time to do so. Only if my long ago Calc 1 lab taught us that instead of making us solve worthless problems on graphing calculators, and then do group presentations on them. Anyway, maybe they are the best route. Though for what I am doing they feel a bit like sand blasting a soup cracker.

Anyway, the good news is that it turns out that CricketGraph actually let you do a log graph! I just had not figured out how... Funny how a little Mac graph widget written in 1988 works so much better than the latest M$ excell.

So, I guess I will get a tad more out of CricketGraph. But I still need to keep my eyes open for something newer.

Oh, and I do need to give GNU plot and R-lang a poke.

The original Cricket Graph remains one of the greatest, most elegant programs ever written. Seriously. I have yet to find a program that graphs as simply and intuitively.

(Note: Cricket Graph III, which was released after Computer Associates bought Cricket, was nowhere near as good as the predecessor, even if CG III did have more chart types.)

It does a very good job of graphing intuitively. Probably because it is a good example of Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Sad to hear that they got eaten. Thought I had figured that something terrible had happened to them. I think that the best I have managed was v 1.3 from Macintosh Garden.