The collected works of Baphijmm

So I finally have my Indigo2 working fully with a proper full installation of IRIX on it, and normally I couldn't be happier; however, for some reason the display it gives me almost always has these distracting lines through it. You can see them quite clearly in the console screenshot attached to this post (which tells me it has something to do with software; if it was a mixed-up signal in the cable, I couldn't capture it in such a manner). It sometimes doesn't happen (seems to be random upon start-up, most commonly occurring). When it does happen, the only time it doesn't display exactly like this is at the login screen, where the display is still screwy, but in a different way - there are patterns of boxes and whatnot, I really can't describe them very well here.

Anyway, I was hoping people here might have some thoughts on how to get rid of these things.

The pattern doesn't change with a different screen resolution or refresh rate; I'm not sure how to change the frame buffer depth though. The one time it seemed to consistently go away was immediately upon installing IRIX (this happened a few times due to the nature of an error previously). However, after a few sessions, it returned. I shall search the forums for bad trams though.

Welp, I took apart the graphics cards and got at the connections with my can of contact cleaner (which, incidentally, is how I got the machine to begin working properly originally); however, while I had them apart, I noticed something disconcerting - the chips on the underside of the boards, the ones with the little heat-sink-looking things attached to them, are not attached to their pads, or at least many of them are not. They are hanging on barely by perhaps another set of tenuously-connected pins towards the middle.

I shall attempt to solder these down later (the cleaning did not fix the problem); I personally do not have a good soldering station (or very steady hands for that matter ^^; ), but a housemate who is not presently in does. Report to follow.

I have recently acquired an O2, and am trying to reset the root password so I can actually do anything with it (it has a version of IRIX on it I do not presently have and would like to keep). I attempted the sgizone.net method of using the installation media to enter a shell and use /root/bin/vi to edit the passwd file directly; however, vi is throwing a fatal error: Cannot successfully map soname 'libcurses.so' under... somethingrather, a lot of what appear to be other system file names follow.

Can anyone give me a suggestion on where to go from here? I cannot find much of anything else on how to progress.

Ryan: It was obtained through a local federal surplus property auction, so, not at all.

The boards still don't seem to be working properly; unfortunately, one of the ICs had a loose contact immediately against another and we could not get the soldering iron in to fix it. I don't think this can be repaired past this point.

For those of you wondering which chips I mean, I'm talking about the ones on the underside of the top two boards; there are six each, and they each have a small what appears to be a heatsink glued to the top of them.

I do not know what you mean by either of these incantations.

Assume I am a jellybrain, as for almost everything related to IRIX administration I am.

I have already attempted the method described there via CDROM, which gave me the error in the first post. I do not know how to mount the drive on another system. Finally, the Jack the Ripper idea won't work very well, as the network was configured for a different network setup than the one I have and thus cannot copy the file to another system because there is no actual way to do this.

Yes, I know that's the other page with the same procedure; I found this out by doing a general forum search for my problem before I posted. This is the exact same procedure that gave me the error described in the first post.

That did the trick exactly; thank you.

Now however, I'm having another problem. This thing was used in a rather unusual network environment; in trying to set up its interfaces to deal with the local network, I seem to have managed to make it stop the booting process about halfway. This occurred immediately after changing the DNS server information in the system and nothing else (I rebooted after each change just to make sure I didn't do something like this). Any thoughts?

Actually, I was just being impatient; after leaving it alone for >half an hour, it timed out and let me go in to fix the problem. ^^;

So I've had this little O2 for a while; it's been a nice machine, but now I'm wanting to try something new with it: video capture. (It seems there are a multitude of threads in this subforum on the subject already!) I have the A/V module, so as far as I know it's simply a matter of hooking up the inputs. Video in works like a charm, for all intents and purposes behaving like a television with the correct encoding; MediaRecorder, on the other hand, does not behave so well. It'll get through some video just fine, displaying exactly as it ought to; however, invariably it seems to drop all video at certain points. To give an example, playing a PlayStation game on a PS2 through the composite video input: It shows the boot-up video, displays the PS logo just fine, and sometimes will even display some of the title video, but past that point it just stops all video support it seems. Again, live video in through all of this works perfectly, hence my confusion. Audio works perfectly as well; even while video frames are "dropped", the audio comes through with no problems. This is before I even hit the "Record" button. Restarting the program does not fix the problem.

Is there something I'm doing incorrectly? I can't find any information on my particular problem online or in the program's help files, so I'm at a wall at this point. Any help would be appreciated.

Both PAL and NTSC seem to work beautifully in just VideoIn. (I have both PAL and NTSC devices, and have switched back and forth in software and hardware.) Both display this issue, though.

I initially thought that might be the cause, but if it were, wouldn't the VideoIn feed cut in the same places? It plays on just fine (and confirmed even while trying to get video to work in MediaRecorder) when MediaRecorder cuts out, again before even beginning to record. While I'm not sure it makes a difference in this case, I'm also using IRIX 6.3.

Well that's just it: No recording is being done. This is before I even touch the record button. The one time I tried, I let it go for about ten seconds, after which it said something to the effect of "no frames were captured at all, so no video was saved".

Multiple sources, multiple cables, yep. All work perfectly fine with little more than a flicker here and there on VideoIn, but all fail to show more than the first bit in MediaRecorder. I suppose it could be hardware-related, but to have different responses from different things feels to me like I'm doing something wrong with the software.

The differences I'm seeing between my experiences and everyone else's I've found on this site or elsewhere is, in this case, not even the preview video shows up in MediaRecorder. Like, it'll show a bit, and on some equipment quite a large amount, after which it just stops even trying to show video, whereas it's still showing the exact same video on the live video input. This is all before I even start trying to record, i.e. I've not hit the record button and MediaRecorder acts like it can't see the video feed it was just seeing not two frames previous. :V

It's not that I dislike the answer, so much as I cannot find the references you're referring to. I don't mind using the command line one bit, but it's important to know the incantation.

What is Ian's site, for example? As I can't seem to find the data here, perhaps I could find it there? All I've found thus far on anything related to this sort of video capture has been lurkertech.com, which only seems to include information on writing video capture programs in their entirety, something that seems a little excessive for this.