The collected works of TeamBlackFox - Page 1

My list:

Memories
REDLINE
Black Rock Shooter ( Really an OVA, but its a movie moreorless )
Howl's Moving Castle
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
Grave of the Fireflies
My Neighbor Totoro
Wolf Children

After OS X Leopard my OS X usage began to wane heavily, I finally sold my Retina MacBook Pro after the Mavericks update would kernel panic the system constantly with no cause, reOSing didn't work and I didn't want to have to revert to an older release, so I basically said " screw it " and moved to BSD.

I am obsessed with retrocomputing, I don't really know why but I like the fact that I'm saving systems from landfills and keeping them in use.

OpenBoot uses the following command to reset nvram to factory:

> set-defaults

Yeah I have to agree that the licencing system for AIX is absurd. I'd look at the Freescale boards as suggested, but I honestly am not holding out for PowerPC.

Give this a try then I guess: http://brahmarockz.blogspot.com/2005/10 ... ystem.html

Works fine over here, at work at the minute so not using it now, at home can browse on Yuyuko and Mima very well.

So I tried to reinstall IRIX onto Gaira as the internal 3.5" wasn't booting. Well I learned the drive had failed as I can't get to it in the command monitor.

So I take the front of the Indigo2 off, yank the HDD and lo and behold its a 50-pin connecting to a 80 pin adapter. Awesome, I thought as I pulled the old drive and converter out. One issue: the drive won't fit in either sled style I have and connect to the SCSI at the back. I could use one of my 50 pin adapters lying around but I'd rather just hook the drive in directly and minimize the hardware going into it. Seems unnecessary to use two adapters.

Anyone have any idea on how to directly hook it in? Do I need to make a cable or something or does someone have one pre made or something. I have a NOS UW 72GB 10k RPM SCSI drive waiting to go into Gaira.

Umm SMJ it looks to me like there's already an UW SCSI connector at the back: why do we need the second converter. I'd like to skip that step and get a direct UW connection because KISS

Okay. Guess I'll order some adapters... Thanks fellas

Perfect. Glad to help, sorry it happened.

Does anyone want to make me a cable then? I'll compensate for time and shipping if they do so. I'd do it myself, but my soldering skills are atrocious and I don't want to risk shorting my I2 out.

Well the Motif toolkit is available for free under the LGPL. Whether or not you should use it is a matter of personal choice.

IRIX has MIPSPro, which is no longer sold by SGI, but it is often available secondhand ( not here though, note the orange warning in the for sale sections ) and via other means. Its by far preferable for programs to be built under MIPSPro, but in some modern programs like Firefox, as far as I know its not really an option.

jan-jaap wrote: GTK 2.x is very slow on IRIX because it assumes certain Xorg extensions and is real slow if it doesn't find them.

So this is why Firefox has lag issues? In that case why not port NetSurf, Origyn Web Browser or some other modern browser? Origyn is available under the BSD licence, and while its rooted in the Amiga realm, shouldn't its lack of dependency on GTK+ make it easier to work with?

Why the anti-webkit bias? I don't care for Safari myself, but I think its a little unfair to judge a rendering engine.

Otherwise, Classic, since you already maintain two firefox forks, could you find some time in your busy schedule to help us fellow IRIX fellows out? (I'm half joking if you don't catch the sarcasm)

Yeah I'm not tota;;y worried about 10Mbit SCSI, this is a storage server so I don't need speed.

So my Core2Duo FreeBSD box burned itself up this morning ( I have horrible luck with x86 hardware )

I posted a thread on a developer site requesting suggestions of alternatives to the x86 garbage running rampant.

After wading through accusations of computer abuse, x86 and Windows fanboyism and generally unhelpful responses, I got one possible solution: An IBM POWER server with a video card thrown in.

Which brings me to the question I will ask here - can someone tell me if this is viable? If so, what models should I look for secondhand? I'm not going for any old Apple hardware, since I just got away from that for good. I'd rather not go POWER out of all RISCS but between it, ARM and Loongson, it seems pretty clear who's the best here.

Not necessarily to run FreeBSD, another BSD is also totally acceptable here. I hadn't really thought of SPARC though... does anyone here have firsthand experience with a box that would be usable as a daily driver? I used FreeBSD on a PowerMac G5, which I ditched due to lack of upgradeability, heat output and just the fact that I despise Apple. And my SPARC experience is minimal at best, but my Ultra 5 was a huge disappointment in the performance department so hence why its not listed in my lineup anymore.

I'm done with x86 hardware dying and costing me $300, $400+ to replace. This box lasted a scant three weeks of being on 24/7, that is just pitiful. I'm not willing to continue to play Intel and AMD's games of planned obsolescence either.

Not getting a PowerPC Mac. As I sold the last of my Apple kit to ClassicHasClass I'm sworn off Apple indefinitely. I need something newer than that, that runs cooler, and is of better quality.

I always have my SparcStation 20, but hell if I'm running that for my main workstation - Mima is faster than that slug.

Classic, I do see your point. I'll have to look at SPARC or ARM gear then, and if I can't find anything there, I guess fuck it, I won't have a modern workstation and I'll stick to SGIs.

Keep in mind folks I do work for Dell, and I have to help maintain about 40k servers in a data center outside of DC. I replace more CPUs and motherboards next to hard disk drives than any other parts. These are Xeon and Opteron servers so they're supposed to be the best of the best, but I'll tell you that the build quality isn't any better - it takes a 6-man crew, including myself, to barely keep the 99% uptime SLA we have with our customer and its all because Dell/Intel/AMD send us so much bum hardware its not even funny. Out of an order of 10 motherboards, we have roughly 1-2 in that batch that will not work. CPUs tend to not be DOA, but I swear we burn through CPUs as our third or fourth most common part to replace.

I see what you mean then I guess. I love Gecko, but making a non-GTK port of Firefox would entail a lot of work, I don't know if we have anyone here willing to take it on. And I'd much prefer a newer Firefox, slow as it will be, to Netsurf because of licencing, which we won't get into.

Yeah Kira after my experiences with it I'll be getting a Sun Blade 2500. I'm less concerned with power and more concerned with reliability really. x86 is obsolete and poor quality at this point.

Its been obsolete since the 386 - its dedication to backwards compatibility has held innovation in the software side of things back, and it is still designed around the same architecture which points to days where memory was expensive, and having everything done on the CPU was ideal. Look around today, its the only CISC architecture still actively developed, unless you somehow count Itanium, and that isn't nicknamed Itanic for anything other than its massive failure in the marketplace. ARM, MIPS and other RISC architectures have long overtaken the mobile market, and even today, if you compare the same class of Intel CPU to ARM and MIPS equivalents, the x86 produces about the same amount of output within a margin of 5%, but it consumes 30-40% more power and costs significantly more. Plus, x86-native architectures all seem to blow don't they?

DOS, WIndows and GNU/Linux were first designed on the x86 ISA, and they all share a common trait - they're horribly engineered masses of conflicting ideals held together with duct tape. Can't necessarily blame it on the CPU, but its funny to me nonetheless.

Anyways back to topic. I'm either going to find a RISC workstation to work with, or pretty soon the only modern workstation I'll be using is at work!

You went over my head there to be honest - I stay out of low level talk because I honestly was never formally educated in it.

You're correct on most of your points - I see that I should have qualified my statements to narrow my scope:

x86_64 is the only CISC architecture in use and actively developed within the realm of the consumer market that I can actually reach with my relatively modest income. 68k has been halted since the mid 1990s, VAX is no longer developed etc.

I'm not even going for SPARC specifically either, but I do want to make the point that I've have had a total of 8 x86 based computers, and all but two failed within a year. One of them that survived was a Pentium 4, and while it survived, it struggled with everything I threw at it moreorless. The other was a MacBook Pro Retina, which kept kernel panicking and because BSD didn't run stable on it, I sold it off for $1000, less than 2 years into ownership. All other machines I owned under the x86 ISA failed within 6 months of continued, 24/7 usage in one way or another, including one in a rack fire that also consumed two XServe G4s I had in the cage and *nearly* consumed some hardware I had rented.

After this desktop I had melted itself and warped the motherboard, I'm fucking done. Never had a SINGLE failure from a RISC based device of any kind. Thats why I started this thread, to see if a POWER server was viable. Then I was looking at the late model Sun Ultras and the Sun Blades, but now I'm just considering screwing it all and staying within the scope of retro RISC and 68k computers.

>You have some impressively bad luck with some hardware there.
That I do, with Intel/AMD chips at least!

> Point being cheap works fine sometimes - now I'm not driving that CPU 95% all day long.
Neither am I. When I wasn't awake or someone wasn't scheduled to slogin and run some builds ( I have a few people who were using it to run some x86_64 builds at night ) it sat idle.

>I found a Sun Blade 1000 for free on craigslist and couldn't help myself - I haven't had a chance to spend any time on it yet, but I'll be running Solaris on it so for whatever that's worth.

Nice find! Let me know how that turns out.

>If you do want a power6 machine, 520s are starting to show up on ebay for ~$1000 give or take
Unfortunately for myself thats more than I'm able to spend, but that may change soon.

> it runs CDE
I don't blame your feelings towards AIX. As I said I'd probably slap NetBSD on it and use that. I'm probably not going the POWER route

>5DWM

Its a shame that it seems under such lock and key I can't run it on BSD - I'd like my Raspi and whatever desktop replacement I get to match the rest of my fleet.

I appreciate your post Cameron. Since I just became jobless a matter of a few hours ago, im calling off my search for now. One thing after a fucking nother eh?

I'm also sticking with my octane and ditching my Fuel because I just don't like it as much as my Octane. Plus as Hamei said, the Octanes are better when if comes to reliability. And I'm inclined to agree. The Fuel feels like an old x86 PC in terms of quality.

On installing NetBSD on an SGI, I'm not downgrading to an unaccelerated X server. I'm also not interested in any more apple products. So my options once I find new employment currently amount to late model Suns, late model HP PA RISCs and possibly an overpriced AEON or ACube system board. Seems like a paltry mix, but HP's PA RISC don't seem to be too much of a slouch even after they jumped to the Itanic, and I seem to be able to get a top of the line C8k for about $300.

I think I may dig one of the X86 boxes out of storage, with a fire extinguisher nearby, and set it up with Free or NetBSD and use it as a remote X server to bolster the limits of Mima. I also may get an Octane 2 from a friend who found one for free so that will help too.

Yeah I avoid GPL when reasonable alternatives exist. If I had to choose between IRIX GPL or closed I'd choose closed.

Seems awhile back the FreeBSD project had a bootable image for the Altix series but I don't know if that went any further

What about qmail? I worked for InMotion Hosting once upon a time ( terrible host by the way ) they used Exim/Courier, which is a nightmare, so when I got my free employee VPS I excised that out for qmail/opensmtpd and I never had any issues, except cPanel bitching at me because I literally had to go in and rewrite some of their crap perl scripts to disable mail server management.

So I was trying to watch one of my favourite movies on Miku today, and lo and behold mplayer freaking pussies out with the commandline output full of " Error while decoding frame " messages

Details on the file: its a 480p, x264/AAC encoded file. Audio comes in fine, but all I get for image is a torn first frame

I have tried the following outputs:

mplayer -vo sgi -fs <file>
mplayer -vo gl2 -fs <file>

on the latter, the X server crashes and restarts and I'm brought back to xdm.

Is this because the v6 isn't powerful enough to display the video? or is it a problem with Mplayer?

Any luck on getting rtorrent built? The ctorrent version is ancient and not even client_test is in the libtorrent in /beta...

I can, but I know absolutely nothing about C++, I'm a C guy, but I'd like to have another instance of tTorrent running in addition to the OVH one.

Damn if only I was rich enough to have one shipped... Good luck with the sale.

Of course the easiest way is from IRIX or OpenBSD, because you don't risk breaking the system because ksh is already setup as needed. Of course I do it on IRIX anyways because its just a lot easier.

As I said, using OpenBSD is likely the easiest if you're comfortable in the command line and don't have an IRIX install box up and running. OpenBSD's man pages and FAQ are very well documented and if you need a machine to do double duty of being able to do something else in addition to install server, with OpenBSD you can setup PF easily to block traffic to bootp and rsh outside of your LAN. Coupled with a decent outside firewall, you should be good to go. One of these days I'll do another OpenBSD box and do a guide.

PHP-FPM is the most efficient form of running PHP scripts, not as fast as mod_fcgid, but less memory intensive if tuned right, definfitely faster and more secure than mod_PHP. However I'd recommend not using it with Apache because honestly Apache post 1.3 was rubbish. Use with NGINX though and you have a killer webserver/PHP combination.

For now I yanked the adapter from my A3000 and put it in there. I have a few drive caddies I'm willing to volunteer if someone wants to give it a shot.

Up to you. I just like my low memory usage with NGINX honestly.

I'll look into it more this week. Been busy away from home most of the time begging for a job, so this got back burner'd.