The collected works of Trippynet - Page 5

Nice! It's always a special feeling unwrapping a new SGI

Very nice! The 600MHz R14000 isn't too shabby, and has twice the cache of the 500MHz version, so you do gain more than just an extra 100MHz. As IRIX is not a taxing OS, it'll run very nicely indeed with 1GB of RAM. Now you just need to pop that hard drive in and get IRIX installed onto it

Impressive! That's pretty much as maxed out as they come. Well worth the long drive I'd say!

Seems as if my Fuel is also beginning to suffer from dying battery syndrome. It's not yet got to the level of losing its MAC like jaan-jap's blue Fuel did last year, however its timekeeping is becoming ever more erratic, and yesterday it also lost the env monitoring setting as well.

For now, I've noted down the MAC so that I can set it back to what it was in the event of disaster, and the clock issue has been worked around for now with a startup script to set the clock from another system on my network. However, the env monitoring issue it has developed is more annoying as the setting keeps turning itself back on, meaning I've currently got to remove the case, hook up the L1 to my laptop and switch it off to prevent the system powering down after 30 seconds (slower replacement fans).

As a short term fix, does anyone know if I can use either of the external serial ports to control the L1? I did try them, but without any joy (unless I'm doing something wrong). Alternatively, has anyone ever used the RJ11 socket on the back labelled L1? Just trying to find a short term workaround which doesn't involve me having to pull the side off my Fuel every time I want to power it up.

Of course, longer term I'm going to have to look at replacing the battery (or batteries as it may be). I think the replacement one for the clock is the ST Micro M4T28-BR12SH1. However, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the env monitoring setting changing itself. Hope the battery in the Dallas chip isn't also failing, although I wouldn't be surprised.

Thanks both! I'll give kubatyszko's method a try. Of course, the one problem may be that if the env setting is being lost, it might lose the console option too and go back to the internal port again.

Classic: I can use the internal one, and did so today to switch environmental monitoring off again. The problem is that every time I power up the Fuel, it means I've got to pull the side panel off to get at the serial cable. Hence me wondering if I could make L1 access a bit easier by using an external port for it instead.

Thanks also for that thread with the higher capacity battery option, I'll see if I can buy one of those. I've found the original one for sale over here with Farnell, it's only a few pounds. But if I can get a higher capacity one, that'll be even better.

Edit: Just found the M4T32 with Farnell. £9, which isn't too bad. Time to order one I think

Google's name won't be changing. What they've done is create a new holding company called Alphabet to oversee various different Google businesses (and others) owned by the company. Google will therefore become a subsidiary of Alphabet and will almost certainly retain the Google branding.

The Wikipedia page about it is worth a read for more info.

I really would have hoped that there would have been a "last chance" message first. Hopefully he's just a tad too busy to visit here regularly and the system is sitting in the corner still. Hopefully...

Especially if it has High or Max Impact!

hamei wrote: Fixed that for you

Ta! I thought my version didn't quite look right

Not a bad idea that. I do have a spare serial extender cable kicking around. I'll have to check our pile of spare kit at work and see if I can scrounge a suitable backplate from there.

Thanks for the suggestion

That's a good plan, although I'd get a bigger drive myself. There's loads of cheap 36GB SCA drives around. Just make sure to do some checking as some of the later SCA drives won't work on earlier SGI machines, whereas others will. I forget the reason why, but I'm sure someone will shortly jog my memory

Edit: Also worth noting is that there's a huge gulf in noise as well. I've had some 15K SCA drives which have been almost silent, and some 10K SCA drives that sound like a tornado tearing through a car factory. Hence it's worth doing some research to make sure you get a nice, quiet drive.

Every single Indy I've ever come across has not had a Floptical drive, but has had the hole left open. It's just part of the design.

Apologies, I was more meaning from a plastic point of view. There was certainly never any insert or plastic covering that I'm aware of.

Although for that matter, I'm not sure if dust is much of an issue, seeing as all systems have a fan to pull air out, and ventilation holes to let it in...

I did the same. Replaced almost all the fans and then disabled environmental monitoring.

One quick note jimmer, some of the quietest hard drives I have are actually 15k ones. They do exist, so don't just assume that a 15k one will make an annoying noise. Of course, I've also come across my fair share of dreadfully noisy drives - including quite a few awful 10k drives.

It's an unfortunate situation when some libraries get updated over the years, and earlier packaged games are hard linked to earlier library versions.

You can try symlinks, they work sometimes. Failing that, older versions of libraries are on Nekoware still (in the obsolete folder). Try getting the correct earlier version from there any popping it on.

Some of them are, yes. However, should you find one that hasn't been mentioned, and a workable solution, by all means do post it! At the very least, others can learn from it next time. At best, someone can maybe, possibly, quickly re-package the affected game with the required library versions relaxed so it works properly with later library builds.

Not overly likely, but you never know!

First thing I do with IRIX is to use tcsh for the shell. It's just so much more flexible and usable than ksh in my opinion. And as it comes with IRIX, it should still fit with your current philosophy

Dillo is fine for simple sites, and renders Nekochan reasonably well. For other sites, I've personally found SeaMonkey to be more responsive than FF2 or FF3 on my Indigo2. Although even then, it's still slow of course!

Random question (sorry it's a tad off-topic), but have you tried Pale Moon? Available for Linux and Windows, uses the classic "Firefox" interface (it's a fork of Firefox 24, so no awful Australis), but is up to date with security and other feature updates. And as some newer addons are more problematic with old FF versions, there's a Pale Moon specific addon site which contains more compatible stuff, including some addon forks. I use it with AdBlock Latitude, which is a ported version of AdBlock Plus. Works a treat!

Don't forget that a lot of TFTs have trouble with refresh rates above 60Hz. I'd try it with that first of all if possible.

My O2 worked fine on a KVM whilst sharing with a Fuel and an Indigo2. Possibly a dodgy O2

vishnu wrote: Sadly MIPS could not maintain that dominance as Intel was outspending them 100 to 1 in R&D.

That and the fact that SGI pretty much ended mainstream MIPS development after the R10000 came along due to Rick's Itanium dream.

If they'd continued to develop it properly, maybe it would have continued to hold its own for a few years longer.

The work you've done with hosting this for so long, and organising all the repository is more appreciated than you can possibly imagine. Many of us would be lost without this forum, and our machines would be a lot less useful too. Even if you do a hamei and start compiling everything yourself, the forum is still needed to discuss bits and ask for pointers and advice.

I'll send a donation over as soon as I can. Not currently at home with access to my main PC as I type this. However contributing towards this place is the least I can do.

ClassicHasClass wrote: If you're serious about selling that Crimson ...

I guess "bigred" would have to become "mediumred" if that happened

nekonoko wrote: I won't let it go away completely no matter what - I'd definitely pass it on to you and foetz if it came to that. Thanks much!

Thanks Neko, I think we're all thankful both for the current site, and the fact that it'd also hopefully continue even in the unfortunate event of you stepping aside.

Should funds dry up in the future, let us know when the Donate button is made available again. I want a nice, purple name to match my Indigo2

nekonoko wrote: I'll open it up again in a few months - a grand total of $900.00 came in over two days, and I was worried PayPal would freeze the account due to the rapid payments. I'd like to see if I could put up some kind of meter in the future that would cut it off once a certain goal/threshold has been reached.

Wow, that's some impressive generosity overall there once you add it all up, and in such a short space of time too!

Problem with MaxImpact boards is that they used to be plentiful some years back, but due to TRAM failures and the lack of Indigo2s being recycled these days, they've become increasingly rare, and hence the price has gone up.

Nyebodnye wrote: Maybe there are less hobbyists seeing as this tech is 20 years old.
I don't really see any way to get anyone who wasn't part of the wonder of SGI into SGI anymore.
Dwindling market.

True, to a fair degree, but prices aren't the issue. Even from Ian, you can pick up systems for a reasonable price, but it depends a lot on what you're wanting. In a nutshell, he sells the stuff with commercial value at commercial prices, and the stuff without this value at hobbyist prices. Yes, it's still more expensive than a lucky dip on eBay, and by some margin, but you do know exactly what you're buying and get a tested and fully specced system. The Indigo2 in my signature cost me under £300, and it has had a couple of upgrades since I bought it. Yes, a bit pricey, but I knew what I was getting, I knew all the plastics were in sound condition, and I wasn't asking for a part which has commercial value, such as MaxIMPACT.

Another update:

Although my Indigo2 was quietened to the level that I could happily have it humming away on my desk for a while, it was still making a fair bit of noise, and I eventually traced this to the hard drives. Not the physical drives themselves, but the fact that they seem to be resonating with the case and producing quite an amplified hum as a result.

So, I chopped 8 little squares off an old and very thin mousemat, punched a hole in each of them, then I removed and re-mounted both of the HDDs so that they're sitting on these new rubber "washers".

Powered it back up, and no more resonating hum, and the system is noticeably quieter as a result. Well worth doing!

mapesdhs wrote: What's the point of that?? You wouldn't see the SGI... :}

Ian.

Got it in one!

Edit: That and I use it for multimedia bits and pieces such as ripping vinyls, listening to music, playing old games on etc. All of which you need a lot more than just an Xterm console for.

Best of luck with it! Anything that helps aid our understanding of these and how to fix them in future has to be a good thing!

s0ke wrote: You're not married are you? @Ian

I have resorted to running a 20ft HDMI cable through the wall in my office that feeds into the closet + synergy. This way I still get true hardware rendering and she doesn't have to listen to "that noisy red box." It does get to come out of the office closet on occasion, but most of the time it's locked away like a neglected step child.

This is why I did the silencing project in the first place.

My Indigo2 is now perfectly bearable on the same desk as I'm working. My Fuel has also been quietened and does not make anywhere near enough noise to become annoying. It's noisier than my PC, but not by too much. At base spec, both systems produced way too much noise to be usable for long periods of time at close proximity in my room without both myself and my wife becoming irritated. As it is, both are now plenty quiet enough to both sit proudly on display, and be usable at the same time.

I dread to think what she'd think if I powered up a rackmount Onyx mind you

Also, bear in mind that the Indigo2 was designed in 1992 and released in 1993. Soft-power-off PSUs were decidedly in their infancy at this point - ATX didn't come along for PCs until 1995, so all PCs of the time still had clunky manual power switches.

Add onto that, the Indigo2 was designed for performance and reliability, not really for power efficiency, and this is probably why it pulls around 12w when off, and why the PSU feels noticeably warm. And why mine always gets switched off at the wall when not in use!

To be honest, a far worse system from a PSU point of view is the Fuel. This was released in 2002 - so should have a much more mature PSU in it from a soft-off point of view, however it still pulls 9w when off. That's a bit crap.

It also depends on which market segment you look at.

For example, one piece of software responsible for shifting millions of PCs into businesses - especially in the later 90s has to be Microsoft Office (Office 97 probably being the most successful version of the time). Regardless of how much it may suck compared with alternatives, you can't deny it certainly helped sell a lot of PCs to businesses, schools etc.

OK, so that's the Fuel resurrected for now.

After putting it off for quite some time, I finally caved in and ordered both a new Dallas battery and a new timekeeper battery as well (the high-capacity version). I also ordered a DIP extractor after hearing Classic's recommendation. Both batteries replaced, and I thought that'd help fix my Fuel's recent woes, but not to be. After powering it up, I dived into the PROM and checked to ensure it had remembered its MAC (it had), then booted into IRIX. No functioning mouse, and just beeps from the keyboard - and they'd worked fine in the PROM.

Powered it down, then after it switched off, it automatically powered back up 5 seconds later with a completely red display. I was then treated to numerous powering down/ups from it, and often the power would be down and the L1 would insist it was up.

In the end, I've dismantled the thing, pulled out all the cables, RAM, V10 etc, then carefully reseated everything and fired it back up. And it seems to be working OK for now, it's into IRIX and it's recognising my keyboard and mouse again, which is good. IRIX date is remembered, but it still reports a ludicrous one in the L1, and every time I try to change it, it complains the format of my input string is wrong (running date 20151017134701). Still, I'm not too bothered as IRIX itself is reporting the correct date at least!

It's one of the reasons why Nekochan is so great for us less-experienced types.

I searched around a lot and used a number of bits in the end! There was your info about serial/PROM stuff, ShadeOfBlue's info about the higher-capacity timekeeper battery module, Classic's info for changing them (and recommendation of the DIP extractor tool), jan-jaap's write-up from his issues (including details of the Dallas chip and info about the serial number), hamei's findings that the Fuel requires a graphics board to boot (hence me removing and replacing it as part of the strip down). I've probably forgotten other bits in there as well, but you get the drift.

Ultimately though, it's about learning from other people's findings and the result is that I have a fully functioning Fuel again. Well, until something else in it becomes flaky anyway. It's definitely nowhere near as well made and bullet-proof as my Indigo 2!

jan-jaap wrote: I updated my mirror this morning just in case they decide to pull it...

Good idea. It'd be awful if Techpubs disappeared without a copy existing somewhere.

hamei wrote: ...The support at user level sucks. You can't get the "I wuvs my sgi ! it's the kewlest machine ever and I wanted one ever since grade school, why don't those meanies at sgi Release the Source ?" group to even try out the most basic apps and give feedback. Developers can't do everything.

And why should they, if no one even bothers to try it and report back ? It's like pissing into the wind.

You know what? I agree with you - despite being one of the more recent hobbyists rather than a professional user. However, I believe that Nekochan needs both types. If you use SGIs purely for professional purposes, it's only natural that as they get older, more outdated and less supported, professionals will often turn to newer/supported machines. Not all of them, but certainly a sizeable number who used to rely on SGIs. Why spend weeks trying to bludgeon something into shape so it'll compile under IRIX, when you can just run it through GCC on a modern Linux machine and be up and running in 15 minutes? If you want newer software easily, IRIX isn't much good these days.

Generally, the only people left using SGI machines are people who love them. Either professional users that don't like the taste of modern Linux and who still love the simplicity and cleanliness of IRIX, or hobbyist users who have managed to buy/luck into an ecosystem that was financially prohibitive back in SGI's golden days.

hamei wrote: But we don't have a community. It's like pulling teeth to get one person to say "hey, the newest version of libjpeg works for me."

The big problem here is that it's very difficult to know whether some of the underlying libraries work unless you're a developer. I can take the latest build of Dillo, test it out and provide feedback because it's an actual app I can run, use and try out - and I have done this. But for an underlying library, they're difficult to test without knowing how much (or little) use of them an end-user package makes.

What I'd propose here is that the devs who manage to compile these try to take a bit more ownership of getting them into current. Rather than just popping them into Incoming, mentioning it quickly, then leaving it at that, push for the testing. Tell us some example ways we can confirm the functioning of these packages. For example...

"Hey, I've just compiled the latest version of libjpeg. It seems to work fine on my Fuel with IRIX 6.5.30, but I've not tested it on other platforms. GIMP makes good use of this library, so if people could open/save/manipulate some different sized JPEGs in GIMP on an Octane, Indigo2 etc. running earlier versions of IRIX and report back, that'd be great. Trying a few other packages that make use of libjpeg would of course also be useful".

As an end user, I now have some info on how to test this. I can try it out, experiment a bit, report back with useful feedback. If you want people who aren't developers to report back and to help with testing, you have to help them to help you. If you just say "newest zlib is in incoming" and leave it at that, getting feedback on that is always going to be a challenge.

hamei wrote: A lot of people would like some games. Fair enough. The Transport Tycoon looked like a natural, until I tried to build it.

Yeah. It seems that 0.5.3 compiles quite easily - although it does crash with a Bus Error when using the map. All other functions are fine though. For 0.6.0 and above, they changed the configuration system, and I cannot get it to complete. I spent a few hours trying to work through it yesterday, but when you have a 10,000 character input string to sed which is being rejected for "too many arguments", it's difficult to know where to begin with fixing it unless you really know what you're doing. As you say, annoying!

Overall, yes I'm admittedly one of hamei's enthusiast users. My PC is my main every-day machine, not my SGIs. However, I'm always looking for things that I can do on them instead of my PC. I've spent a chunk of time recently playing a couple of ScummVM games on them. I could do that on my PC, but I prefer to do it on my SGIs if I can. Similarly if I can get OpenTTD working, I'd love to spend a good few hours having fun with that under IRIX. I do like to use my SGIs for proper work as well. I rip vinyls on my Indigo2, enjoy odd bits of perl scripting via NEdit etc. Hence, older retro games, game engines and emulators are things I'd like to see, plus simple and useful productivity tools.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents!

No offense taken, I fully understand your point. Enthusiasts are nice, but of rather limited use when it comes to porting/testing software

That would be fantastic if it could be done. A modern/updated MIPSPro compiler (even with a different name) would be very useful indeed. Especially of course since GCC has dropped support for IRIX, so that's only going to steadily grow further out of date over time. Of course, I assume it's still capable of generating decent MIPS4 code...

Edit: Reading jan-jaaps post (added whilst I wrote this), might have guessed there's a bit more to it...

They seem to be on Waybackmachine: http://web.archive.org/web/200608300826 ... net/wings/

Don't worry, we're only one place better...