The collected works of acidchrist

Hi, my name is Nathan, i'm 21 years old and i live in France. i recently bought my first SGI system, an octane with a single 300mhz R12k, 1gb of RAM, 9gb HDD and SI graphics (without TRAM ). I already spent a lot of time trying to get it working, without success. i suppose i made all the noob mistakes. Here's the story, i hope that it helps someone.

-first i had no display and the front led stayed red. i thought about a hardware problem, so i reseated/cleaned the internal boards, checked the front panel with the diagnostic LEDs (which were good) only to discover later that the problem was that i had no keyboard plugged in. so, i plugged a PS/2 keyboard ( /!\ an USB keyboard with a PS/2 adapter won't work, you need an actual PS/2 keyboard )

so my octane finally booted but i still had no display. i was using a 13W3 adapter advertised as working on SUN and SGI systems. with those adapters you apparently need to have an SOG compatible monitor. which of course none of my monitors are. i tried the octane on my main LCD screen which is an acer AL2216W (the one without DVI), on my LG 42" television, on an old 17" lcd, on an acer AL2016W, a philips 15" lcd and even some CRTs. none of them worked.
At this point i was doubting that the problem came from the screens themselves so i took my octane to a friend's house where he has a SOG monitor (an old proview 700P 17" LCD). 150km at night with an SGI octane in the passenger seat of your car is something you have to do once in your lifetime .

So, when i was there the octane booted right up and an image appeared on the screen immediately. i finally got the chance to see my system working. so when i got back to my house and after a lot of searching about 13W3 adapters on the neko forums i noticed that in cases similar to mine ot was advised to strip the 10 center pins on the 13W3 side of the adapter.
After a lot of swearing and cutting myself by accident i managed to do this with a small pair of pliers. it didn't work at all. needless to say i was pissed. So i bought an actual new SGI VGA cable (part number SGI 018-0881-002, available on ebay). i think (hope) that with this i should finally be able to use my SGI. i haven't received it yet but i will post about it when i do (probably tomorrow).

pic of said octane:



also i noticed this on one of my friend's install CDs (from the 6.5.11 release):


wtf, SGI ? (my friend also told me that the 6.5.11 gives errors/problems with scripts when installing, on both octane and O2 systems. SGI systems sure are a lot of fun! )

i know, cool story bro

i'm really interested in the INDY if it's in good shape (visually) , however i do not know how much such a system would go for...

i've been wanting to try one for a while and it's almost impossible to find one that's functional AND in good shape/without missing parts or cracked case where i live

i'm in the north of france so not too far from you.

what would forum members think is a reasonable price for this indy?

thanks

EDIT: apparently this system is equipped with GIO presenter boards. i'm not familiar with these so i do not know what they're worth. i guess i could spend about 100/120 euros including shipping (so 80/100 euros for you) for the bare indy with the "GIO" board removed, if the skin is in really good condition (the reason for this is that i bought an octane and received it with the skin badly scuffed, and i'm about to buy an O2 with a damaged skin too, so i'd like to own at least one SGI system that doesn't look like sh**, plus the indy looks really good )

maybe post pics so we can see the hardware in the "flesh" ?

hello,

maybe i can help by speaking to the seller and asking him to ship to the U.S. (if he speaks french but i suppose he does)

is it SGI stuff? will the package be very heavy/huge? i live in the north of france, 30km from belgium so maybe i could help with what you're asking but i'd prefer not to use the french postal service with heavy/fragile items because i have had a lot of bad experiences in the past (they even "lost" a friend's powermac G5)

thanks for your replies

i received the cable today. when i plugged my acer al2216w i still had no display but the screen stayed powered on this time.

so i tried it on my HDTV and IT WORKS !

finally seeing the octane boot screen, and on a 42" screen was just awesome

however my joy was short-lived because the system doesn't boot. my keyboard apparently isn't compatible (it's an el-cheapo PS/2 keyboard with extended keys for win 98 ) i get an error, it tells me that i can't plug more than one keyboard, which is i think caused by the additional win keys.

so the first thing i thought was "im just gonna open this fraking keyboard and unplug the module with the win keys". so 23 screws later i finally saw that the additional, and useless keys were in fact hardwired on the PCB itself and there was no way i could just make the keyboard become a regular, non-windows98 ps/2 keyboard

i tried "resetenv" but without luck. so i just need a working keyboard and i will finally be able to play with my huge vacuum cleaner/electric heater.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p ... 3BC97B4B88

those are old videos made several years ago by the creators of X-86 secret.

if you have a bizarre sense of humor, aren't afraid to hear some frenglish and you like to see x86 stuff destroyed (which i suppose you do since you're on here) those videos will make you laugh (or at least smile). the RAID failure makes me almost piss myself every time

i recommend duron vaporising, RAID failure and computer exorcism

yes i have a ps/2 optical mouse, but a very basic one, extremely light. it works fine during bootup (i can see and move the cute little red pointer). keyboard works fine too in the prom, except that the numlock and caps lock keys aren't where they should be. i get a similar error message about the mouse too during bootup, but even without mouse it does the same thing (keyboard error)

also every time i press a key the error reappears and the keyboard apparently is reinitialised (the leds blink once all at the same time like when it boots)

they are in the right ports too. as i mentioned earlier, the system booted fine with my friend's SGI keyboard/mouse setup so i really think that the problem comes from my keyboard

if the indy is indeed in very good condition, i would be interested. it would be great if you could take some pictures.

what would you ask for the indy with the bag and the keyboard and mouse?

GeneratriX wrote: [
Ahhh... if only Flash could work without suddendly closing Firefox 3.5.6 on Ubuntu 9.10...

having installed 9.10 recently on my macbook and my core 2 pc i have a lot more problems than i had before with the 8.xx.

the only things that made ubuntu interesting were its simplicity, compatibility and reliability and now it appears that it just isn't worth using anymore. i think i'm gonna try archlinux instead

i actually saw ubuntu uninstall itself in synaptic after an unknown problem when i was installing stuff from the universe repository (it uninstalled packages like ubuntu, the kernel, and everything else) and without telling me anything or asking me what to do. i was used to see such horrible failures on windows but i'd never seen anything like that on linux

hi everyone

it is finally working ! i'm using an old microsoft ( ) keyboard and it's perfect.

so far i created an user account, set up networking, and downloaded the nekoware distribution.

i put the nekoware on my macbook, launched an NFS server on it and the SGI recognised it and mounted the filesystem without any problem. I installed boinc and seti and the Octane was crunching all night. Nekoware is awesome. And i have to say i was impressed by the performance of the octane in floating point. For 300mhz and old ram it's very powerful. Irix is really fast too, probably due to the 1gb of ram.

is there a nekochan seti team?

i am now a member of the nekochan seti team

i only have the octane and the macbook running for now but once i get the core2/CUDA machine back on i should have an acceptable RAC

why would you do that?

no

hi,

i'm interested.

do you accept paypal ? and how much would be shipping? (i'm in the north of france)