The collected works of commodorejohn - Page 3

Man, K-Meleon. For a while there I almost used that as my main browser, until stuff just stopped working with it. Looks like it's finally updating again, though...

OpenBSD has been, in my experience, the free Unix that least makes me want to kill myself.

vishnu wrote: Hence the makefile errors, GNU only thinks "embrace and extend" is evil when Micro$oft does it...

Well, naturally! GNU is Righteousness and Purity - independent projects should welcome absorption into the Collective!

So I picked up an Ultra Enterprise 2 at the recycle center today, along with a couple SBus cards (they got an assload of Sun stuff in last Friday, and I missed getting a nice modern SPARC tower by about an hour - they were just finishing tearing it apart when I walked in.) It's a dual 300MHz UltraSPARC-II system with 1GB RAM and a 75MHz Creator 3D series 1 display adapter, and I supplemented it with a SunSwift 100Base-T/SCSI card and a Turbo GX accelerated framebuffer card. The only problem is, it's not quite working. There's no video output at all, on either card. The serial console comes up fine, which is encouraging, though it insists on going through the full POST every boot, I think because the NVRAM battery seems to be dead. The big problem is that I can't get it into OBP at all; the POST completes and it claims to be entering OBP, but it never goes to a prompt, and sending a break from the terminal doesn't get one either. Here's the logfile I took:

And that's where it hangs. Any idea as to what's going wrong here?

Update: figured it out. One of the CPUs is either bad or a mismatch. (Edit: it's bad and a mismatch.) When I remove it and boot it in single-processor mode, it works fine - except for the part where evidently a paranoid sysadmin sledgehammered both hard drives (but carefully reinstalled them!) before sending it off to the recycle center! Guess I'll have to rustle up a couple new hard drives (and maybe a replacement slave CPU...)

Still, not a bad haul at all. Even a single 300MHz UltraSPARC II is going to be a serious boost over my Ultra I, and having dual-head capability and 100Mbit Ethernet is just icing on the cake.

Probably gonna throw OpenBSD on it and hook it up to a SANE-supported SCSI scanner I got from the recycle center a while back - should be a little nicer than my current scanning solution, a Win9x-only SCSI-over-parallel-port scanner hooked up to a PIII laptop.

Seriously? I ran it on a 166MHz Ultra 1 with a measly 128MB RAM and it was perfectly usable. Faster than Solaris 8, even. Even did X fine, as long as I stuck with lightweight window managers like WindowMaker, which I was planning on doing anyway.

vishnu wrote: If ShadeOfBlue is right and GCC code generation for MIPS is really finally fixed maybe it's time to drop MIPSPro from the nekoware tardist FAQ in favor of GCC 4.7+ (heresy heresy!).

This is GNU. It's only "finally fixed" until some random loser's commit breaks it for stupid and probably stupidly ideological reasons and then it remains broken for another year and a half until someone finally submits a patch that fixes it but breaks something else.

Yeah, that'd explain it. Luckily, both the Creator series and the GX series are supported by OpenBSD, so I should have (simple) acceleration on both displays.

I should be getting a replacement CPU and hard disk this week, so I should hopefully have it up and running before long

Leopard is "around" on the Internet, if you get my drift. But you'll need a dual-layer-capable DVD burner for it.

Well, it took forever to actually get replacement hard drives, but it's now up and running with two 18GB drives and running OpenBSD just fine Now I just need to get X acceleration working...

Question, though: is there a way to force the Turbo GX framebuffer to display at a particular resolution/refresh rate? It doesn't generate a sync signal when I use it with the simple hard-wired 13w3-to-VGA adapter I use with the Creator framebuffers, and I suspect that it's just opting not to output a picture because it's not getting a valid resolution on the 13w3 sense lines. I have a KVM module with switches for the sense lines, but it doesn't work at all...

$40,000!? What, is he throwing in the coach drawn by unicorns it gets delivered in?

I still have my uncle's original 233MHz Bondi iMac, which I got for free after he finally traded up to an Intel iMac around 2007 or so...I still have nostalgy attachment to the thing (ah, the days of running GliderPRO on that thing...) but I have no great desire to own another half-dozen of them.

I'd trust a VTech kiddie "computer" for embedded control applications before I'd trust anything running a modern, commodity desktop OS, I'll tell you that much.

They decided to skip version 9, for no reason that any sane mind can fathom. Allegedly because it's such a major overhaul, but it looks exactly like Windows 8 with a bad imitation of the old Start menu tacked on, so I don't know what the hell they're on about.

R-ten-K wrote: self awareness, that post has none...

Sense, your post does not make any.

GIJoe wrote: windows explorer functionality seems to be getting downgraded with every new release ever since vista. well, their whole OS is a disjointed thing anyways.

Unfortunately true. Windows Explorer was never anything amazing, but it used to be a fairly solid, dependable file manager/graphical shell for those of us who didn't need anything fancy. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been trying to progressively dumb it down and turn it into a glorified media-library browser for years now, and ever since Vista they've taken away more and more of the options for getting it back to its sensible old self. Worst of all, they've started changing shit that breaks existing workflows; that's been the last straw that got me to suck it up and have another go at acclimating to Linux after three years of leaving it the hell alone.

It amazes me that a company that built its entire success on a line of operating systems that might at times be buggy, unstable, slow-ass memory hogs but that, when working, just plain work like you fucking expect them to from every previous version could decide to throw all of that out the window and start wrecking its own shit like that. Oy .

I don't know the low-level details, but it's some kind of patch you install. It definitely helps bring Win8 closer to being usable, but unfortunately they've fucked up too much else for me. (For starters, even Classic Shell doesn't fix the irritating thing where minimizing a window no longer sends it to the back of the Alt-Tab list, which is hella irritating.)

I dunno about Photoshop for IRIX, but Photoshop 7 at least has a "fixed size" mode for its rectangular selection tool that can do this, as well as a "fixed aspect ratio" mode. Quite handy.

People who say "I hate American beer" actually mean "I hate the bifurcate-monopoly Miller/Budweiser swill that crushed or bought out virtually all the competition back in the '70s." Leinie's is a good example of how fallacious it is to equate that with American beer as a whole (they've been around since the Before Time - I don't know how they managed to survive the extinction event that claimed so many other brands, but I'm glad they did,) and thankfully in the last ten or fifteen years small breweries making damn good stuff have seen a huge resurgence. Try something from Summit or Deschutes or Sierra Nevada, and then try to tell me American beer as a whole sucks.

vegac wrote: Pity Dillo is so limited...it's certainly got speed on its side.

Unfortunately, the fact that Dillo is so limited is why it's got speed on its side. We put such absurd demands on web browsers now, with elaborate layouts and absolute mountains of Javascript even on a lot of pages that would be perfectly fine without it, that it's basically impossible to have a browser that's both efficient and full-featured enough to make a lot of modern webpages happy. There have certainly been some heroic efforts (yo, ClassicHasClass!) but ultimately the choice comes down to efficient-but-limited versus full-featured-but-beastly...

Eh, no thanks. Rum and gin at least are good mixers, but vodka, as far as I can tell, is just paint thinner sold for human consumption. Whiskey takes some working up to (I can just about manage a dram before I max out,) but the good stuff absolutely rewards the effort with rich, intense flavors and aromas.

I thought we learned from Google Glass that all this stuff accomplishes is to make people into oblivious, insufferable assholes?

And it's a crying shame, too, because SweeTango is delicious...

Anyway, after arguing about this with starry-eyed "futurists" over on another forum, it's a breath of fresh air to come here and get some good honest cynicism.

Is the KDE toolkit as much of a nightmare morass of kitchen-sink dependencies as the eleven billion interdependent packages that make up the KDE project as a whole? I'd steer clear of it if that's the case.

It's increasingly painful to browse the web without NoScript nowadays.

hamei wrote: * I actually have a kind of funny story to illustrate that, but maybe not for here and now.

Oh please do share

nongrato wrote: This must be so hard to be you.

It would be a lot easier without initiates from the Cult of the Great Goddess Progress constantly yawping about how everybody must use all the latest software at all times and enable Javascript so that every idiot website can display its static page content like this so whatever idiot designed the page can feel validated that he put his own personal stamp on everybody's interaction with his page whether they want it or not and must search diligently for whatever unintelligible icon has taken the place of coherent, readable text labels for hiding crucial website functionality and like it , dammit, and everyone must face Cupertino five times daily and offer prayer to the Prophet and AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH .

Seriously, this is not just one of hamei's Board-Certified Crank rant topics, this is genuinely irritating shit that gets to pretty much any sensible human being who values their time more than some web designer's ego-masturbation. My parents are just as irritated by it, and they're a far cry from any of us nerds who understand exactly why it's so perverse; they just don't have time for that shit, but they have to put up with it anyway (I'd introduce them to NoScript like I did for my brother, but they're not savvy to the point where it would save them time compared to having to dick around with manually enabling things one at a time to see which magic combination of completely unrelated domains have to be whitelisted to make voodoo happen.)

foetz wrote: that's supposed to be an abstract representation of a list (of options). the gfx guys these days must be more lazy than ever

It's this Windows 8 fetishism for ultra-ultra-ultra-abstraction and single-color shapes with no lines on them. Because, you know, it looks modern, or futuristic, or European, or "globalist," or whatever the hell thing they come up with to describe it next.

God, I miss the days of icons you could actually tell what they were .

But hamei, these are the Good Guys doing it! That makes it Right and Just!

Oh, YouTube's been bitchy about old browsers for years. They've yet to actually make it stop working on anything, because they don't want to lose out on ad revenue from the millions of grandmas viewing funny cat videos on IE6, but of course the Cult of the Constant Update has to beat their war-drum nonetheless...

Whaddya mean "now?"

glxgears is laughably inadequate as a test of 3D functionality, though - and software GL makes the baby Jesus cry even on a relatively modern CPU. That said, if you don't intend to do any 3D or use fancy compositing-window-manager glitz, framebuffer X can be pretty adequate; I've gotten usable results (even to the point of running Dillo quite comfortably and Midori not so comfortably) running OpenBSD on a 133MHz SPARC box from 1995, so anything more powerful than that should do perfectly well.

All version-control software is shit. It's all just a series of convoluted ploys for different nerd factions to claim useful projects as part of their little software fiefdom without having to formally annex them. You can tell because they always make you download and install their terrible client software in order to get at anything, or else dig down into whatever obscure little corner of the site they may possibly have hidden their "download a snapshot" functionality (and the snapshot never, ever compiles into a working program.)

I wouldn't get your hopes up for a production run of anything 9000-related. I got my HIL converter from another hobbyist, it's a third-party item, and I'm pretty sure it was manufactured in the mid- to late '90s, when those machines might still have been out in the field somewhere. You'd be better off either trying to find another hobbyist with a spare or trying to hack something up with an Arduino or something than waiting for anybody to do a production run of the things.

You forgot the part where she's actually a man.

I'm still getting my feet wet with SGI, but my plan when I get ahold of a copy of Photoshop is to use my O2 as a scanning and light image-processing workstation for when I finally get my webcomic off the ground.

Boarding-house comedy with fantastic-realism elements. Think oldschool Bloom County meets, I dunno, Skin Horse . Or Thimble Theater with monster-people and clockwork robots.

If somebody starts a petition, I'll vote for it just on principle. It'd be terrific to be able to port IRIX to, say, that Yeelong MIPS laptop and have it on the go, just for the hell of it

The only independent devices I've seen to do this are priced ridiculously; I'd just find a monitor that natively supports it. The two I use are the Samsung Syncmaster 173p, which doesn't actually support signals without separate sync but will filter the sync signal out of the green signal (which is enough to work with my O2, I'm not sure about other SGIs,) and the NEC Multisync 2010X, which has full sync-on-green support.