The collected works of ClassicHasClass - Page 5

I'll try that after I upgrade it. I don't remember if it's turned on or not.

Oooh. I'll have to look and see what's in mine.

It's a Fujitsu something or other in there, but it's not very loud. (Then again it sits between an MDD G4 and a quad G5, two machines not noted for their silent operation, so I could be just ignorant. )

Up to 6.5.22 and after a bit of headscratching on apparently circular Nekoware dependencies, just threw them all together in a dist directory and let swmgr sort it out. Gonna get Firefox 3.0.19 working on it next. I still need to fiddle with the mouse emulation on the KVM.

The mouse emulation issue suddenly isn't a problem anymore. Maybe 6.5.22 fixed it? Maybe I had some gnarly weed?

My RAM still hasn't arrived, but the M-Audio 7.1 card did, so I stuck it in one of the 33MHz slots and it works nicely (scaring the cat playing DOOM at top volume). The FireWire card arrived as well, but the Fuel hardware aggregator says it has to be the red board Adaptec and this one is green, but it's OHCI so shouldn't it just work? Is there any point at all to FW if you're not running 6.5.27? I haven't bothered to install it yet.

Hopefully the RAM gets here this weekend (2GB).

I'm used to FireWire on my Power Macs where I can sling hard disks, system backups over HD Target Mode, DV/HDV and webcams, so fighting with non-hotpluggable iffy mass storage and no video doesn't sound too gratifying. That said, I might as well install it and see if it's recognized, since all of my Macs that need it either have a PCI card already or built-in FW. The card doesn't need drivers for Mac OS, so I'm sure it would work in Irix.

Interesting. I have two IIDC cams here, an iSight (which I believe makes Irix crash, according to the aggregator), and an Orange Micro iBOT. The iBOT is different enough that I might give it a shot. That RAM better arrive today.

I have a Canopus ADVC-300 here too. Is that what you mean by "card"? It's an external FireWire device. I have ADS Pyro A/Vs coming out my ears, but I see Neko tried and failed with those.

More importantly, do these all work with 6.5.22?

I also have a line on a 700MHz R16K card, but the seller wants a lot of money for an untested item and I'm kind of worried about putting it in my only Fuel.

I installed the green-board Adaptec FW card (it's an Agere controller, apparently) and I'm grabbing the patches and DM10 tardist. I'll report back.

EDIT: Hmm, my Supportfolio credentials seem to be gone.

Okay, I give up with Supportfolio; it's not letting me get those patches for some reason. Is there any reason I shouldn't install 6.5.26 then? Someone mentioned Adobe, but as long as I still have (or can get) Acrobat after the update, I don't care. I did get those CDs. I should be able to install DM10 1.1 with that, I assume.

It seems like if I want FireWire at all, though, I'm moving to 6.5.26 because I can't get those patches from Supportfolio. Should I?

The 300 just appears like a video device to the Mac, though it does have an optional picture quality control panel.

Rather irksome that a bog-standard OHCI FW card that even works with Mac OS 9 without drivers won't work in Irix.

Okay, I'll see if I can just track down 6.5.30 and go "all the way," then find a red-board Adaptec FW.

*looks at PowerPC assembler in the Terminal window* Well ...

Yes, please let us know! I might grab a couple for my 350.

Well, the confusing part is that the Adaptec I bought (as NOS) has the red card on the box, but the green card inside. I really can't blame the seller as the box was sealed. I'll give it to one of the Macs, I guess, it was only $9. I'll just have to look for a used part.

Speaking of, managed to land an 030-1981-001 700MHz R16K card after negotiating down the price. It's untested, but it was a working pull, at least. There isn't any PROM limitation on what CPU board can be installed, is there? (I know with other models like the Indy there is, but I can't find anything about that for the Fuel.) The swap doesn't look like a difficult install assuming the connector isn't mashed.

I wish. Even my refurb Power6 cost me close to $10K in a reasonable configuration (sufficient RAM, 2-way, RAID), and just try getting IBM to sell you anything if you're not going to buy a service contract. That $5K base shrinks off in the distance really quickly.

But I think hamei meant the Indy (right?). As a starving student when it came out, it was juuuuuuuust ... out ... of reach. But boy did I want one! And listing for around $5K wasn't all that much compared with, say, the Quadras and (gurgle) Performas they were foisting on unwitting undergrads in the university bookstore. Hell, the Q800 MSRP was (checks service circular) $4700 new itself. I don't remember what the ed price was, but it wasn't a whole lot less.

When I did summer research at the Salk Institute, I got one all to myself and even took my picture with the IndyCam. That was good times.

Everything under the Sun is in tune
but the Sun is eclipsed by Larry Ellison

I have an RPi (with an Atrix dock) that runs RISC OS, and I think it's a beautiful interface, but the problem I have is *doing* something with it.

Case in point, the two computers I probably use 3/4ths of the time are both "vintage" Power Macs (a quad G5, which is my desktop workhorse, and an iMac G4 which is my second workstation). The quad runs the full spectrum of applications, Photoshop, HD video editing, browser (TenFourFox, natch), terminal, software development (mostly in Terminal but a little in Xcode), some games, office apps, and my classic OS 9 apps (QuarkXPress being the major one I need Classic for). The iMac does VNC, terminal, browsing and a little bit of old-school Palm OS development with pluac2. The quad is almost seven years old, the fastest of the Power Macs; the iMac is about a decade old.

Terminal and net access, though, is the majority of what they do and I think the majority of what most people do. I'm fortunate in that I'm skilled and crazy enough to maintain a fork of Firefox for Power Macs (TenFourFox) that can still run on 10.4. We're current with Firefox; our port of Fx20 will come out next week, and we maintain an ESR port for "less adventurous users." Short of plugin support (for security as much as compatibility) and WebGL, the browser supports everything Tier-1 Firefox does, even most add-ons, and even has a PowerPC JIT for JavaScript. This means I don't really need an Intel Mac (I do for Android development and TurboTax, but those are two specific applications).

When I tried using RISC OS on the RPi, NetSurf is very capable within its skill set, but it can't do much, and lacking JavaScript support altogether is a real concern. ISTR there was an Fx2 port at one time, but even our beloved SGIs are now capable of at least Fx3 (not a minor point, since Fx3 is the first Firefox that was Acid2 compliant). And given how important a reasonably current browser is in today's world, it hurts the platform. I certainly couldn't use it on a daily basis, let's put it that way. At least Raspbian has Midori, even if it's WebKit (IIRC).

They recognized this in the PPC Amiga community too. There's at least a Firefox 4 port, anyway, and that's a start. (Various versions of WebKit Origyn still float around on that platform also.)

This is part of the reason I still try to do updates periodically on Classilla, although the renderer is still rather lacking; it can do some JavaScript, and when emulating a mobile user agent, it actually doesn't do too badly on layout. I can take a Mac OS 9 laptop on the road and still do a lot.

Mind you, I don't like putting my money into x86. So, when I needed a laptop that could run Flash for an online course I'm taking (I won't run Flash on Power Macs anymore because of the security pitfalls), I bought a Samsung ARM Chromebook, turned it to dev mode, and installed a miniroot of Arch Linux within ChromeOS. This does everything I need, and I don't need to feed Chipzilla.

Hopefully some enterprising soul in the RISC OS community is trying to narrow the gap. I do like the Iyonix hardware.

I think you misunderstand me. I definitely appreciate how well RISC OS is put together and how well it interoperates. I'm saying that even with all that, even though I *like* RISC OS, I can't use it as a daily driver. It doesn't do enough of what I need it to do.

But yes, I definitely appreciate its design.

Well, that's good to hear. Mind you, I certainly prefer simpler web pages too, and the growth of the mobile web has been good for niche browsers since they tend to be more functional than flashy. But we're getting to the point where a certain minimum capacity is being assumed, of course, and the rapid release strategy of both Mozilla and Google is pushing that time faster and faster.

So it's good to know that RISC OS is trying to keep up.

Making fun of its (almost excessively) modular nature.

I'm a sendmail dweeb, but then, I can actually write my own sendmail rules. I don't even use the m4 processor to write sendmail.cf; it just gets in the way. (But then, if you can understand Perl, you can write sendmail rules. )

I hand-wrote an enhanced greetpause and RBL support for my own local sendmail. Of course, I devoured the O'Reilly sendmail book when I bought it.

The only place I ever saw MMDF was SCO.

Okay, so. I got a red TI-chipped Adaptec 4300B and I'm going to install 6.5.26 probably tomorrow. I might try the Agere again unless everyone is absolutely adamant it won't work.

But before that, I went ahead and got the new CPU installed. Irix hinv recognizes it as an R16K with 4MB, as expected. However, I'm a little nervous about doing the L1 flash step, since I don't think I'll be able to reinstall the old 600MHz R14K card afterwards, correct? Anything wrong with just leaving it as a "600MHz R16K" so that I have a spare CPU card, or is it not worth it (I assume they don't fail very often, but ... )?

Playing with some demos, just going R14K to R16K was enough to get a noticible bump in frame rates even without setting the MHz up.

SCSI drives? How did you install it?

Welcome. Sounds like a great collection. I'd love the space for a Crimson ...

Or novel coronavirus ...

It's threads like this that make me realize how little I've accomplished with my collection.

Which is why I love the Indy most of all. But if I can't have a big red Crimson, at least now I have a medium-sized red Fuel.

This needs to go in a FAQ somewhere. I got the exact same error trying to get firefox3 running, and I had to reinstall not only pango and fontconfig but also gtk2.

So I'm trying to bring fx3 up on my Fuel. (Note to diegel: I'd like to partner on porting 3.6, since for TenFourFox I've been able to get the JITs working for PowerPC and I think we can very easily get TraceMonkey working on sgi-mips. 4.0.x should also be achievable -- if I can get Fx21 running on a Power Mac, we should be able to get a later Fx running on an SGI. ) After struggling with the fact that swmgr totally ballsed up pango, fontconfig and gtk2, firefox3 starts, but spams the console with



There are various graphical glitches; menus don't properly display; the background of the web page sometimes doesn't paint right away; scrollbars and controls are often invisible, though I can still interact with them and the browser basically works.

I'm suspicious this might just be a symptom of a bigger problem, though: Audacity and E-UAE both look like ass, with bizarre colour fringing and illegible fonts, though they don't have the redraw problems that Firefox does and they don't generate the same assertions to the console.

Fuel V12 graphics, 1920x1080x72, 16-bit buffer, 24-bit hardware acceleration (gfxinfo -vv available upon request). Suggestions appreciated.

Actually, it doesn't work until at least Mozilla 1.6 due to changes in how CSS overflow is computed.

Yeah, the problems are all with gtk2 stuff. I'll try that colour depth adjustment first tho.

Where was I for this thread? Anyway, the G5 quad gets a bad rap because of the slower units which had the Delphi LCSes. The quads almost all have the much more reliable Panasonic ones and have a better power supply as well. My bought-new quad G5 is still running and is still my daily driver almost seven years after I got it.

Yeah, the Mac Pro is faster, but it's a fairly uninteresting Xeon design. (commodorejohn, why do I have deja vu?) The G5s aren't what they should have been, but the good ones are solid machines, and they're at least somewhat interesting to the collector (which, I assume, is what the OP is after). The quad G5 and the dual 2.3 are the ones worth owning and have the best track record.

I'm not a fan of the Intellistation, but mostly because of the software, not the hardware (which is solid). AIX hasn't been a good workstation OS in a long time, so you'd be running CRUX or something on that, and at that point why bother fiddling with what's basically an exotic Linux port? If you want a PPC 970 machine, stick with the Power Mac G5 and run OS X, and enjoy the software library and MacPorts.

I like the Fuel a lot. You'll pay a premium for a decently configured unit, and as mentioned they're uniprocessor or bust, but I'm pretty happy with mine and they're not hard to work on and maintain. I got lucky and found both a 600MHz/V12 machine and a 700MHz CPU PIMM for a nice price, and added FireWire, extra RAM and audio. You could go whole hog and get a Tezro if you really want multiple CPUs, but the Fuel is still very nice.

I own a C8000 and I really like it, but the Fuel replaced it in my KVM slot because the Fuel "does more." The C8000 basically only runs 11i TCOE; forget about Linux. While it has some very nice hardware (mine is a dual-core PA-8900 with a FireGL card), it uses more juice than even my G5 does (!), and HP-UX is about as bog-standard CDE as you get. You can install a second processor with a special tool, but that makes it even more hungry, and even the low-end PA-8800 versions were dual core also. I didn't use it for anything other than showing off.

I run 10.4.11 because I still use Classic. ISTR that Kubuntu works on them reasonably well, but I'm happy with 10.4.

... aaaaand YTMNHamei! Thanks! All the assertions disappeared. Works perfectly except there's a odd glitch with icons for gopher sites, though I imagine I'm the first one to notice. Going to play with it a little more, but so far no major problems.

I got a 4300B card with a TI controller and managed to drag the Fuel up to 6.5.30 and most of the Nekoware essentials. It's recognized as a DM10, so when I get a chance I'll unplug the iSight from the G5 and see how it works. What's your recommended app for testing capture?

The 7800GT might work with WebGL under AuroraFox.

Hulu should work just fine on PPC OS X -- even on 10.4, with Flash installed. I just tried it with 0.9.10, and I'm still able to watch shows.

But, the footstand! The C8000 must have the footstand!

Those are nicely maintained systems. If I were more of a SPARCky, I might think about picking up the 'stations.

I like CDE, personally, and I'd still pick SGI.

That's something I've been curious about: what do you tell the L1 to downgrade the CPU speed? I upgraded to a 700MHz in my Fuel recently (from a 600MHz), and it's very nice, but it would be good to have a fallback strategy for the remote possibility that the PIMM fails someday.

No, I know how to flash the PROM (I couldn't have upgraded if I didn't ). What do you do if the PIMM dies? You can't boot IRIX then, and I can't put the 600MHz unit back in. So is there a way to fix this from the L1?

Larry Ellison. Because he couldn't let Steve Ballmer be the *only* @$$hole in computing.(tm)