The collected works of Nedry

Good day everyone,

i just fulfilled myself a childhoods dream and bought a beautiful Octane Workstation on ebay.
Back in the days when i was a little nerd kid my father sometimes brought one of those "sgi PERFORMER" Magazines home from work. I LOVED this magazine and the mysterious, colorfull computers in it... even though i never really knew what to do with those machines, but what i knew was that they had to be VERY fast and powerfull. Some years later i did an internship for a 3d animation studio and finally got to work on some sgi systems! Boy i can tell you that was an absolute great experience, i was the luckiest 15 year old boy on earth that time. OK enough with emotional stuff here.

Surprisingly my new Octane came with a bunch of really great preinstalled Software like Maya, Smoke, Inferno and some other Discreet Legacy products.
But the IRIX Version is a plain 6.5 without any overlays. Not even the NFS Subsystem is installed. Of course i would love to get some nekoware running, but i know that i need at least IRIX 6.5.2 to run nekoware stuff.

One Question:

1. i would need a cd drom drive to connect to my octane. Any suggestions about that? Is there a list with compatible scsi cd drom drives for octane anywhere?

thanx in advance!
and sorry for my poor english.

edit: oops. Sorry, i edited my posting. Makes my posting a bit obsolete now, but its better to not start off with trouble here

@recondas: thankx for the advice. I will do so.
I contacted sgi asking if theres any possibility to get irix 6.5.30. No answer yet but everything i found out so far is that it is impossible to get anything from sgi without a support contract.

@vishnu: you mean the IRIX 6.5.22 Maintenance Release?
you are right, sgi still offers it as a free download at the supportfolio, gonna update my octane to .22 the next days.

damn it, i just read some more old threads here about overlays and updating... seems like i will get some trouble if i try to update from 6.5. directly to 6.5.22.
Just as vishnu mentioned before i have to get at least 6.5.3 first.

im searching ebay like crazy since i got my octane, but theres not much going on with irix media at the moment. Just some silly offerings like this one:
http://tinyurl.com/kjasah8

yeah, right... 150 Euros for 13 years old used software.

nevertheless, thank you very much for your tips and tricks!!!

aaahh, ok. I allways just did uname -r. Uname -R now gives me a bit more information. Thanx again

it says: 6.5.9f
Can i install 6.5.22 straight onto my 6.5.9 ?
If so i will give it a try this weekend.

i cant paste any hinv or uname data here because i cant access nekochan with the shitty netscape on the octane. I tried to install Mozilla a few days ago but there were so many dependencies and missing libraries that i gave up on that.
Any other ideas how i could manage to transfer the hinv output to my macbook?

edit: i gave it another try with mozilla from the sgi freeware page and managed to fix all dependencies. Installation went fine but when i try to run mozilla from the terminal as root it says permission denied. The run-mozilla shell script spits out some error messages i dont understand.

Yep, im allready running swmgr 4.1. I installed the patch few days ago in my irresistible enthusiasm. Seems to work fine with 6.5.9.



I am at work right now but as far as i remember the location of the installed mozilla was: usr/freeware/mozilla
i had to search for it via find since i had no idea where the files could be located after installing.
As you can see im still quite foolish with irix. Laboriously the squirrel lives.

i finally had some time this weekend and managed to update my octane to 6.5.22.
AND finally got neko_firefox 2.0 running. Yay!

Now that i can access nekochan from my octane i can finally post some hinv here.

i never thought i would ever say this to any sgi system... but... this case is uuuuugly.
Even the boring Indy S Box looks beter than this thing.
Sorry folks.

But indeed interesting find anyway. Never seen this before.

I allways wanted to have something like a big and really COMPLETE overview of ALL sgi systems ever made. With photos of course.

oh damn it!! Too late for the SUNs. As much as there is this fascinating thing about old UNIX Workstations... its even MORE apealing when they come in original packaging. I just saw an originally packaged Next Color Station some months ago, the shipping box itself is a beauty with the nice NeXt Logo on it