The collected works of chicaneuk - Page 3

ClassicHasClass wrote: Sexy! And the box!

Where did the "idiot outside" sticker come from?

No idea Was something from the previous owner. Bit of fun I suppose but I like my SGI boxes as clean / original as possible so it had to go very quickly!

Unbelievable. Went to switch it on today to show a friend and it's dead seemingly. Will not switch on. It worked the last time I turned it off. Time to see if the PSU in my other Indigo2 is compatible with this one I suppose!

No dice sadly. Left it unplugged for a couple of minutes but doesn't want to know.

The only add-in beyond graphics is an EISA 10/100 network card. There's only one internal SCSI drive. I popped that out hoping for the best but no luck.

Sadly my skills with electronics extend only about as far as plugging and unplugging things - I've never got into home electronics in terms of soldering, etc so there's no way I'm opening up the PSU.

I will check out part numbers though and see if the PSU in my other R4K Indigo2 is suitable for R10K/IMPACT as I can at least get it back up and running again, and the R4K doesn't really get touched much anyway.

jan-jaap wrote: Hamei is right. An Indigo2 always has that 'snappy' responsiveness that even the fastest O2 lacks. The R10K/R12K are rather restricted by the O2 architecture.

Thank-you! I recently acquired an R10K Indigo2 and immediately thought how much quicker it felt than my O2 which had a faster CPU (R12K 300MHz). Just a general all round level of snappiness and responsiveness - the O2 felt rather more old and out of shape in comparison. But when I posted my thoughts in the hinv thread I created, I was somewhat shot down.

I'm glad it wasn't just in my imagination!

Definitely

It seems as though my very recently acquired Indigo2 IMPACT blew it's power supply. Disappointing

Just wondered if anyone had one at a reasonable price for a fellow enthusiast?

Many thanks.

Yeah - I did have a read of that. I've literally not used a soldering iron since school and would be worried about cooking myself through my ignorance of electronics and handling capacitors so not sure opening the old power supply is really something I should be considering....

duck wrote: Ah, it's the 3.5" size.. if they were 2.5" I'd have jumped on the offer. Got enough (too many) of those already

In the future wastes people will be bartering using HP drive sleds...

This guy on eBay has them for £9.99 with free shipping... not a give away but not terrible, unless you need 20 of them or something

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-5-Tray-Cadd ... 2ed3bdff16

I actually have access to amounts of these drive sleds on dead disks (which the support company never want us to return) but I think it'd look a bit suspicious if I started stripping the caddies off!

Sorry Ian, didn't mean to thread crap - I mean that eBay guy had the 2.5" version of the sleds, not the 3.5" which you're you're kindly offering for free

Bump.

Ian Mapleson has them starting at £75 / $113 - it's a fair enough price given the scarcity, but was hoping to come in under that given that I didn't pay much more for the whole system - including the system itself, monitor, SGI keyboard & mouse, external DAT drive, external hard drive, external CDROM, and vertical standing feet!

That is an extremely kind offer.. I could look into the shipping costs, but I suspect they may not be friendly - and as you say you've no way of actually testing the supply.

I do have a few friends who are very competent with computer electronics but I sort of hate going to them with my begging bowl in hand.. I'm inclined to ask one of them though and see if he fancies having a go at this.

Would anyone be able to point me at the exact capacitors I'd need to buy as I have absolutely no clue at all with this sort of thing!

I may well be in touch uunix - I need to bring that Octane drive back to you at some point anyway so could kill two birds with one stone..

Priced up capacitors from Farnell (barely even £1 for all the ones I need) and a friend of mine who's very good with electronics looked at the guide and said it looked 'an easy repair' so going to try and arrange an evening to pop over to his in the coming weeks and sort it out

And this is why I've settled on just using MacOS X. The downside being you need to spend a fortune to get any reasonably performant hardware versus what you get in commodity PC land, but the OS is coherent and fast and has the benefit of being able to drop to a shell at any point, and run X11, and all the other UNIX or GNU Linux tools you love. It truly is the best of both worlds, and honestly for me, is by far and away my favourite OS right now. And you have the advantage of being able to get native versions of the Microsoft Office suite, and Adobe applications, and plenty of other stuff that you might ordinarily only be able to run on Windows.

I know Apple always divide opinion though..

I think the fact you can get actual Microsoft Office for the Mac makes it very popular. Hobbyists such as us can bang on about freeware alternatives such as Thunderbird, LibreOffice and so forth but with the way Microsoft are going integrating the suite with things such as Office 365 (which has email, SharePoint like portals, team document sharing / productivity) it puts LibreOffice and the ilk in a difficult position and really does leave them quite a ways behind.

Besides, I don't personally consider it 100% compatible either with Microsoft Word / Excel, etc type documents. I don't blame that on the LibreOffice developers necessarily and I'm sure there's quite a lot of effort in Redmond to make their products NOT play completely nicely with open source alternatives, but taking a moral stand on the evils of closed source software to explain why you corrupted some collaboratively worked on documents or your reports don't render correctly, probably isn't going to wash.

Ultimately though it depends on your environment, what sort of productivity applications you actually need to use. In our place people are reasonably free to use what they like. The web development team & networks guys all use Linux, most other people use Windows, and there's steady growth in Macs (myself included).

Why bump a nearly 8 year old thread?!

Nice Is it early type green skins as per the Octane's you had to scrap?

tomvos wrote: We need people like Stallman. People that irritate, people that have a clear message. People that stand their ground, no matter what the odds are.

Which is not to say that I agree with everything what Stallman says. On the contrary. His lack of ability to acknowledge other peoples work is one thing I really can't stand.

Nevertheless, he challenges the current way we deal with software. And this is a good thing. Because if you really think that our current mental state how we think about software and the implications by software as codified rules are beyond improvement ..., well then you really must have been living behind the moon in the last few years.

I do agree with that in many respects.. the problem is I think he just does nothing to sell his message well. When you come across as being so militant and strongly opinionated in your beliefs it just turns people off from listening to you. Couple that with, frankly, the rather crazy looking appearance and the average person who has no knowledge about free software and so forth will basically cross the road to avoid him and his message.

Hi all..

I won this weekend an Origin 200 for the princely sum of £10.50 on eBay. Apparently it's in working order, but just missing a power supply. I think I assumed they'd be more powerful than they actually are when I looked into what possible configurations they come in (as there was no hinv available) so I'm wondering if it's worth resurrecting it as power supplies for these don't seem to go cheap.

Thanks.

I didn't read that bit! That would be very cool though I think he was expecting to get more than £10 for it

It looks hopefully that it's got dual CPU's and is well loaded with RAM so might be a decent specification. Will have to keep my eyes peeled for a PSU. And front plastics / bezel.

Ah - top tip. Thanks. Will keep a look out.

Hoping to pick my Origin 200 up tomorrow night. From what I can see it looks to be in superb condition skins wise, and not stuffed full of dust. However as seems to be very common with these, the front door is missing. Think I'm going to have a hard time finding one - even mapesdhs doesn't list one as a spare on his website

Ah.. good information. So that's another part I need to find when I come to bring it back to life! I think it will probably sit collecting dust for a little while but at £10 it seemed a shame not to save it.

It is a shame that at the very least that they don't just make IRIX ISO's available with absolutely no warranty expressed or implied. Just give you a link to the media and leave you to get on with it. That would be a huge help.

Very nice system indeed

Well I didn't expect that result in the semi's if I'm honest.. Are you to try and get tickets for the final?

Add the feet and the Indigo2 is a tower again anyway

Shame they're only SolidIMPACT's but still looks like a good haul

I've got an i7 Macbook Air and it's honestly one of the best systems I've ever owned. Yes, Apple are engaging in ever more disappointing tactics to extract yet more money from their customers and I still can't get my head around the new Macbook with just a single port for charging, accessories, etc etc.

BUT. My Air absolutely screams. I honestly can't think in the 18 months I've had it, that I've had more than one or two "WTF" moments when the computer is churning away on some unknown process, or it's done things I've not expected. I open it up, it fires up immediately, and it just works beautifully every time. It's this kind of reliability and well thought out design that I guess keeps people coming back despite the crazy prices. I know I'd be very reluctant now to replace this Macbook Air with anything other than another Apple notebook when it starts to get a bit tired.

Cross your fingers for me this evening. I'm a Grimsby Town fan and want to get out of the conference. We've got the first round of the playoffs tonight against Eastleigh... kick off at 8pm.

Second leg on Sunday. Think we needed more of a cushion but not bad. Think we've got a good chance of getting to the finals.

I'm not from Grimsby, no. Good friend of mine is a lifelong fan (same as his dad) and we used to talk footie on and off over the years and I ended up following them. Have followed them really since the year they dropped down into the conference so.. can't really be accused of following them for the glory - it's been a disappointing couple of years

I picked this system up on eBay for the princely sum of £10.50 a month or two back, but it was missing a power supply and fan. I really just bid on a whim expecting not to win so I was kind of surprised I did.

Anyway - been extremely busy and have been skimming eBay on and off for parts but nothing much shows up for SGI's over here very often. Thankfully got in touch with mashek on here and he hooked me up with the spare fan I needed and the power supply for a fair price so I took the plunge. All parts arrived on Wednesday, but then real life issues got in the way again for a few days. Just got home after a stressful few days, friend dropped me over a serial cable and I was able to fire it up for the first time. Seems I plugged everything in correctly (and the gods of Mountain View were smiling on me) as despite never having had an Origin 200, it all worked first time. Here's the hinv (as I had no idea what I'd be getting) - my first dual CPU SGI finally



Will check the capacities of the disks out and then if I get some spare time over the weekend, might throw a fresh install of IRIX on it. Not much to show in terms of pictures - sadly the front skins are all smashed up (as always seems to be the case with these), front door missing, etc etc.

Not sure mate - it did actually boot with the disks it came with, but not done any investigation as yet. Will try and dig into it in the next few days

We're off to Wembley!

Well the killer question was - did you really only pay $4 for the whole system?

It is no wonder that as soon as LCD's became affordable, the CRT died off so quickly. I remember the days of going to LAN parties and having to lug my computer and monitor back and forth and it became excruciating after a while. Not to mention working in IT as computer monitors ramped up quickly from little 12-14" tiddlers, to being regularly 17 or 19" - my poor back.

Take a read here

http://software.majix.org/irix/network-setup.shtml