The collected works of Krokodil - Page 1

smj wrote: DS10s are quite nice, as is that O2 - and what luck that the plastic skins survived shipping intact! You'll read plenty of horror stories about them disintegrating during shipping... And quite the collection of software, too. These are generally regarded as quiet machines, so I expect you may just have a noisy hard drive or fan that could be replaced.

Minor correction, though -- SSH originated in the mid-1990s, well before Digital UNIX was renamed Tru64...

jan-jaap wrote: IIRC, there were people who placed really large CRT monitors on top of their pizzaboxes and cracked the case. Ever seen one of those 24" widescreen Sony FW900's? It weighs nearly 50kg.

Trippynet wrote: The O2 is thankfully one of the easiest SGI systems to silence (probably beaten only by the Indy with the Sony PSU, and even then the HDDs are a bit more of a faf to sort as you need adapters for the newer SCA drives). I replaced the PSU fan in my old O2 with a quiet Noctua fan and popped a really quiet 300GB hard drive in it (snaffled for free out of a dead server at work) and it was almost silent by the time I'd finished. Overall it's a nice little machine and a great starter system for someone coming into the SGI fold!

hamei wrote: Anyone want to do some trading ? I'm sick of this worthless fucking piece of shit. It's either get rid of it or throw it out the window (10th floor, bad idea for innoccent bystanders but big pleasure for me.)

hamei wrote: I am very tempted to discard the Octane as well and get something that actually works, say a cheap Dell, but have too much invested in software and learning-time to do that. Plus the Octane has been reasonably reliable. The rest of this stuff is just crap. Disgusting worthless crap. May as well run Loonix on it, a partnership made in heaven.

TeamBlackFox wrote: No, the PSU is fine! The MB just died suddenly, spared the CPU, but killed itself and the RAM.

[[C|-|E]] wrote:

jan-jaap wrote:
I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

This is a very interesting discussion and I think that you really have a very valid point here. I know that we tend to mock Dells and many other PCs from particular vendors but in my hands they are super-reliable work-horses. My workstation in the lab is still a Dell T5400 from 2008 and it has been working 24/7 since we bought it, only stopping for the upgrades. It is a rock-solid machine and still quite fast for today standards. The same is true for many other old Dells, like the Optiplex 745 or 755 we have here, that have been silently working for many many years in a dark corner covered of dust. I could say the same of the HPs or the Lenovos. I am running a cluster of many little Quad Core M57P Lenovos with 8Gb of RAM per unit and they have been performing flawlessly for years and years. My O2 has never failed, but I would not dare to let her ON for such a long time .

IRIX seems to be so...obtuse?

vishnu wrote:

Krokodil wrote: I also just won an Octane off fleabay, in good cosmetic condition and reasonable specs.

Reasonable specs are a question of taste, some people consider a 195MHz Octane with 512 meg RAM to be reasonable, which I find to be in extremely poor taste...

armanox wrote:

vishnu wrote:

Krokodil wrote: I also just won an Octane off fleabay, in good cosmetic condition and reasonable specs.

Reasonable specs are a question of taste, some people consider a 195MHz Octane with 512 meg RAM to be reasonable, which I find to be in extremely poor taste...

Reasonable is also relative to your goals with it. Although since bumping mine from 384MB RAM to 1280, quite a few things work better. Now if I could only come into a dual 600MHz CPU, I'd be fantastic.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I will say (as you pointed out) that the licensing sucks, and it looks like there isn't a hobbyist license program anymore. I'm working around it by using Dropbear instead, though I can still only login as root on the console, which is a drag.

Axatax_ wrote:

would also like to see this added to the Nekoware collection. It's a great piece of software. So please don't give up on it.

I haven't given up -- but I *really* want to get the Mplayer 1.1.1 out the door. I've promised this for like eight months. S*it -- I'd love to do a new XMAME/MESS package, and I'd also like to get an Ardour port out (and I actually have some semi-working code for the later, as well as Jack, if you don't care about VST plugins).

Sh*it -- maybe we sould make some kind of Nekoware crowd funding thing... I dunno. I'd quit my job in a heartbeat to hack away on IRIX stuff. How cool would an IRIX port of Snes9X be with gamepad support? Samus doing TAS runs on your Octane? << -- I think that would qualify as death and ascension to heaven. Just MHO.

opcode wrote: So I am home alone today with nothing to do. I was upstairs reading Introducing the UNIX Sytem by Henry McGilton and Rachel Morgan and waiting for my new ebay Indy to arrive. The phone rings and I don't recognize the number so I answer it. It is a gentleman with an Indian sounding accent and he tells me that my computer has problems and is reporting errors to their web server. I think, oh this is going to be fun....

I switch to a noob idiot kind of voice and start answering his questions. I chum the line so he smells blood in the water. "Oh no, how can we get this fixed?" He asks me to go to my computer and then asks me to locate the ctrl key at the bottom left of my keyboard. He then asks what is the key to the right. I respond "da A L T key" (spelling out the letters). We go round and round for a minute and he starts to get agitated and thinking that I am an idiot and can't see the Window$ key. I then tell him "It is an older granite keyboard, I don't have a Windows key.". He then asks what kind of computer I have. I respond with "It is a Silicon Graphics Indy". I can hear him telling someone in the background and it seems like they are looking it up on the internet. He then tells me that he is transferring me to the senior technician. There wasn't any technology with the phone, the other guy just started talking to me. He said, "That is a nice computer you have!". I say "thanks!". He then asks me what I see on the screen. I say "I see my Indigo Magic Desktop, the ToolChest, the Dumpster, home directory, Photoshop, and Buttonfly icons.". This really confuses him. He asks me if I have a Windows laptop, I reply "No, I don't like Windows very much.". He asks what internet connection that I use. "I got one computer that is using an Integrated Services Digital Network line, OC3 on the WAN interface of my router and I also running a token ring and FDDI network with my six other computers.". He asks what other computers I have. "Onyx2, Indigo, Indigo2, Tezro, Octane, and an old azz O2." He then asks if I can go to Google and type in team viewer or something like that. I imagine that is some sort of remote control software. He has me click the download button and then asks me to double click it. My response " I am going to have to download that in SoftWindows, I won't be able to open a .exe file directly... It won't run on my RISC MIPS R5000...Probably cause it ain't got no branch prediction.". He then asks what operating system I am using. "IRIX 6.5.22m with Nekoware!", I enthusiastically reply! He then said that he would have their IRIX specialist give me a call back in about 30 minutes.

I have to hand it to them, they really did give it the old college try. I was kinda surprised that they didn't figure out I was messing with them. If they ever call back, I promise I will record it!

joostp wrote:

Krokodil wrote: Does this version of ResidualVM also run Escape from Monkey Island?

No, ResidualVM 0.2.1 doesn't support EMI. The game seems to work fairly well in current development builds, so hopefully it'll be included in 0.3.0.

ClassicHasClass wrote:

Would it be worth investing in the pci cage for a SCSI card usage? Also, would it be worth considering upgrading to a dual cpu unit...should I be able to find one? I suppose that last question is just personal preference.

The PCI cage? I think so, if SCSI throughput's going to be what you'd use it for. The extra CPU would mostly benefit using it as, you know, a computer.

Once you go Irix you don't go, uh, bye-bye-rix.

foetz wrote:

Krokodil wrote: you'll need the extra power to run mplayer well

why mplayer?

hamei wrote:

foetz wrote:

calvin wrote: nor is it optimized for server workloads and applications.

could you be a bit more specific?
how are server workloads and sever applications defined? and is that not completely dependent on each case?

You do not want me to go dig out an email I once got from the guy running Hubble's storage on SGI He had plenty of very negative things to say about both the product and the people.

My own experience with both a Fuel and an O350 has been quite negative as well. The desktop and the applications are great, but I wouldn't depend on an SGI to watch the paint dry.

They went broke for a reason It's easy to get caught up in liking them because at one time they were good, but that time was looong ago. And short.

It's still way better than Loonix tho

ajw99uk wrote:

ivelegacy wrote: but ... what is your secret against vamp femme fatale, buddies ?
How can you collect workstations avoiding to be engaged into a bloody war against the girl/woman you live with, under the same roof ?

Rule 1 - say yes to pretty much everything except "will you PLEASE get rid of those d----d computers?!?"
Rule 2 - obey the "one in / one out" rule (or at least don't break it with anything big)
Rule 3 - do not try to impose a similar rule on boots / hats / whatever your significant other collects
Rule 4 - be patient; having shared a study for several years, I now have it to myself for 'putering (with more/better shelving and a second table/desk)
Rule 5 - don't mess up your significant other's computer (learned the hard way, after inadvertently leaving a laptop unbootable due to an incomplete GRUB installation)

To give my wife credit, she put up with another room being stacked half full with various computing equipment for far longer than had been anticipated when we offered some temporary storage for a small part of the TNMOC collection. Managed to hand that back shortly before our daughter arrived. But occasionally I come unstuck - the arrival of the Fuel (my second SGI box) about six weeks later did not go down well, so I had to try to sell the Indigo2 (no offers, shucks .

I keep within reasonable limits by going for smaller stuff - a Saintsong EspressoPC in place of a large Compaq desktop, and two Raspberry Pis - and making judicious use of KVM and VNC to do as much as possible from one monitor (or occasionally two), or from a laptop in the sitting room. Last year the girls were away for a few days so I had a chance to set up the old Acorn RISCiX boxes on the dining table for a session, and early this year an Octane snuck in on the premise that it was for someone else who then found two elsewhere .

foetz wrote:

Vladio wrote: I like old but something that still has functionality. Something I can install some apps to play around with.

that's the main problem with everything but irix. for desktop use it's just nothing there with the exception of maybe some rather specific things you might have by accident such as cfd visualizers or some cad stuff.
for more common use solaris is your best bet. there you can have a quite recent firefox, openoffice and gimp but that's about it. with all others you're out of luck as far as the desktop goes unless you're fine with just a text editor and compiler i.e. a pure dev box.

foetz wrote:

Krokodil wrote: There are some freeware packages floating around for Tru64

like these: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16729289 ?

Still makes a fine server though.

of course, as mentioned already this is all about desktop stuff. for server use all unices are great

ClassicHasClass wrote: I stuck a DECchip-based video card in mine. Much, much faster in Tru64. NetBSD can also accelerate this framebuffer (tga).

commodorejohn wrote:

ClassicHasClass wrote: Given all the crap Lenovo's pulled of late, I'd love one ... from some other company under license.

Yeah, there's that...on the other hand, I'd kill for a 4:3 laptop in this era of inevitable widescreen crap.