The collected works of deBug - Page 2

TeeTylerToe wrote: it's about 17.5 megabytes a second. the Ultra wide SCSI-2 that the O2 uses is 16 bit, 20MHz iirc, I'm sure it's 40MB/s.

With no audio, or audio at 22KHz 8 bit mono no frames dropped, 32KHz 8bit stereo I think frames started dropping >.<. looks like 250MHz is a stretch. I can record the audio seperately I guess.

Yes the O2 SCSI is 40MB/sec.

Here is some benchmarks made with my O2 and differnt disks.
30MB/s possible with modern disk on sequential writes.

HP servers are the current "bread and butter" of any IT operations these days.
DL320, DL360 etc. are nice machines.
There are models that can take a lot of disks in the server box if you dont want to run an external storage cabinet.
For Raid controller I can recomend HPs P400 or P800, fast and reliable.
All this of cource comes with HPs great installations tools and server start.
Get a machine that has ILO (Iintegrated Lights Out) that will allow you to remote control the mahine over IP even if it is turned off.
You can turn it on, reset it, go in to BIOS, isntall OS etc. with ILO.
The above suggested machines comes with ILO.

Seems a bit expensive for me though, to buy new enterprice class machines for the proposed aplication.
Why dont you just keep the current P3 computer and add a few 1TB SATA drives, run software mirroring and your done ?
Add a cheep IP KVM so you can manage the box in to BIOS, reinstall OS and software in case of server crash.
Belkin, Avoccent etc has a few inexpensive boxes.

I like to have original mouse, keyboards and monitors to my SGIs to get the correct retro 90ies feeling.
The ball mouse is no favorite though. I guess that most people even in their most nostalgic moments don't want to use it if they can avoid it.

So I built this.

It is an original Granite Indy mouse with the electronics from an MS explorer mouse inside!

It's a joy to use, and without the heavy ball inside the mouse is feather light gliding over the rubber mouse mat with unhindered ease.


Here is a guide how to do the conversion.
Start by getting an Explorer mouse, thats an old 5 button Microsoft mouse with a red light at the bottom.

Why this mouse ?, well it has a very small circuit board so it is easy to fit in the old SGI mouse plastics. It also works well and is PS/2 compatible.

I used the optical encoder from the MS explorer mouse but not the buttons as they did not line up well to the plastic push rods in the SGI mouse.
Instead I used the original buttons from the SGI mouse.
I then linked the SGI buttons with the MS explorer board using a few wires as shown in this diagram.


To start the conversion first open up the explorer mouse and remove the electronics.
There are three circuit boards, you want to keep the middle one that holds the optical encoder.


De solder the small board that holds the red led, it has no function other than to "pimp" the explorer mouse.
Also remove the front circuit board, It will be easier if you cut the wire that links the two boards and then clean out the remaining wire from the solder pads.

Once you have cleaned the solder pads put the explorer board aside together with the plastic lens from the bottom of the explorer mouse.
It is now time to turn your attention to the SGI mouse and to fire up the dremmel tool!
Remove the SGI mouse circuit board and with the dremmel tool cut across the board 2 cm under the buttons.

Discard the old SGI board and test fit whats left of the button boards in the SGI mouse again.

No comes the most critical moment in the build, glue the plastic lens from the explorer mouse under and up in the hole that used to hold the ball in the SGI mouse.
Make sure you get a flush fit of the plastic lens to the underside of the mouse, you need to cut or file two small indents to get the plastic lens flush and level to the underside of the mouse
If you get it wrong the lens will be out of focus and you mouse will not work.
Epoxy glue the the lens to the underside.
Let it cure and then flip the mouse over and glue it from the inside as well.
Drop in the button circuit board and test fit it, file or trim it until it sits well.

Now its time to wire it all toghter.
In this last picture you may notice the six solder pads near the left mouse button. In the top mid hole there is connection to all buttons so thats an excellent place to solder the 180ohms resistor that needs to go in series with the return wire from the button switches.

At the other end of the resistor solder a piece of wire.
Then solder wires to all three switches, every switch has three connectors, solder the wire to the mid connector.


No its time to connect it all.
The 180 resistor needs to go to ground, I used pad 8 on connector J2.
Left button switch wire goes to pad 2 on J3 connector, mid goes to pad 3 right goes to pad 4.
And last, complete the soldering by soldering the SGI mouse cable to the J2 connector.
Closeup of the button wires.


Closeup of the SGI mouse cable.


Now assemble everything

and test the function of the mouse by plugging it to an old PC or so in case it fries the computer. Once it runs fine on a PC you can test it on an SGI computer and run a confidence test in IRIX to check out the buttons and movements.

To get the mid button to work you first has to set the systune pcmouse 2 parameter in the kernel
Read this blog entry for more info http://www.nekochan.net/weblog/archives/000025.html

If you don't get good mouse movement, try to lift the optical board at the back end a few millimeters. I found that one of the de soldered micro switches from the MS explorer mouse had the correct height so I ended up placing it under the back end of the pcb and fixing it with heat glue.

Once everything checks out, fix all the boards and cables with heat glue from your trusty glue gun!

Put on the top, screw it down and you now have a unique optical granite mouse that will be as smooth as silk on an Indy mouse mat!

//deBug

pinball_0 wrote: excellent hack!!... now I'd put some weight into it to give it a solid feel.

Thanks.
When it comes to weight, I guess there is two schools
Some people like it to be heavy some dont.
I opened up an old optical Logitech mouse and found that they had placed a weight inside it so I guess their design department thought their customers liked them to be heavy.

Myself, I like it to be as light as possible.

noisetonepause wrote: Excellent. You could sell those.

Hehe, always nice to have a second carer to fall back to should my IT manager skills fall out of vogue
Although I think the world market would be somewhat limited as most people would probably just use the explorer mouse as it is.

Congrats to the new CPUs !
So you will do a new batch of upgrades now I guess?

I bought a R5200 300MHz with the correct blue wire at the volt regulator so I could have it modified to 600MHz but then I found a 600MHz module on Ebay for the same price that the conversion would cost and bought it.
I have been happy with my O2 but always thought to be a bit to slow even at 600MHz.
But today I plugged in the 300MHz to test before selling it, and my god! At 300MHz it is like moving in quicksand glued to a safe in slow motion slow!!
I cant understand how I could run the O2 with 200MHz R5000 and 300 R5200 for several years!
How quickly on forgets.

My fuel has definitely spoiled me

Works fine on my fuel.
No segfault on exit on my box.
Everything is just dandy.

Any chance you could expand it with an option to read in a user determined image file to use as environment map?

Great job!

//Harry

Hi.

So you wanted to netboot your SGI and install IRIX but you think its to complicated to set up a netboot server?
You would love to have nekosync download and unpack all Nekoware for you but you haven't gotten around setting it up?
Have you ever needed a server that you can share files between your SGI, Macs and PCs?

In that case DINA might be something for you.

Get the full story and download it here http://zachrisson.net/DINA .
[Edit 2009-07-18]URL above is outdated, use the URLs below.
Documentation here:
http://se.mirror.nekoware.net/SGI_related_files/DINA/Documentation/DINA_Documentation.html
Download here
http://se.mirror.nekoware.net/SGI_related_files/DINA/DINA1.0.zip

//deBug

Ohhoo Bummer!! MY connection just went south.
Im Uploading it to an external site.
Takes some time as IP going out from me right now is going in snail pace.

Here is the info :
http://web.telia.com/~u58007278/

Download it here http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4340839/DINA
If you download the torrent, be patient as the my upload seems to be really broken right now. Grrrr, need to speak to my ISP
Great timing !

//Harry

It turned out that my ADSL modem had gone south, probably the summer heat was to much for it.
I'll go for modem hunt tomorrow, but at least the torrent is now seeded by other so should be possible to download.

Thomas, torrent files doesn't contain anything except a link.
The link allows a peer-to-peer program to find and download files.
The most popular and efficient bittorrent software for the PC platform is micro torrent http://www.utorrent.com/

josehill wrote: I was only getting throughput around 0.5 kB/s. Now that I have the file, however, I'm pushing it to other folks at 50 kB/s. 1.5 GB pushed so far!)
JH

Thanks for helping out JH!
My Modem is shot,the uplink hardly work at all, thats why it was so slow when i posted the torrent.
I borrowed another modem today so i could complete the upload, but had to switch back to my old defect modem to get the IP TV going so my daughter could get her dose of project runway.
Hopefully I'll get a new modem tomorrow that will do both IP TV and upload and then I''ll be back seeding again.
Thanks to everyone that has stepped in and helped out with seeding for me.

stuart wrote: Oh - shiny!

My site's back up again now after a long outage due to my RAID array suddenly dropping several disks at once (I shouldn't have used five disks from the same batch...) - so it's at least possible to get a screenshot without a version warning

I cinda prefer that over the "old version" varning
I'll update the nekosync version on the next version of DINA

stuart wrote: Might it be worth including sgisync too, to allow people to auto-download any patches for the version of IRIX they're about to install?

Great work,
stuart

Good idea, I'll have a look at it for the next version.


Misc info:
I have a new ADSL modem now so I'm back seeding and my webpage is accessible again.

If you used the console in DINA you may have noticed it is not using US keymapping.
It's Swedish, I havent found info on how to restore the US keymapping in NetBSD, anyone ?
But I was able to restore it on the graphical consoles so if it is big problem for you just start the graphics and use the aterm console.
Not that you should ever need to use the console but one never know, somenone might just have to use the CLI or they wont feel like a real man

//deBug

josehill wrote: Thanks again for putting this together, deBug. Would you have a "cookbook" of how DINA differs from a default NetBSD installation, e.g. configs, any extra sw installed? Just curious...

Mostly changes to config files in /etc and some of my own scripts in /usr/dina
There is a copy of the changed config files in /usr/dina/cfgfiles/factory if you are curious.
The only "inovative" stuff is a script that is started at boot that monitors BOOTP request and if a BOTTP request from a SGI computer is found the DHCP server is configured to accept it and the computer is given an unique name and IP number.

josehill wrote: PS. 2.5 GB seeded...

Thats great, thanks!

nekonoko wrote:

jdboyd wrote: I am obviously in the wrong part of the country for getting such things.

Nah, not in this case - this particular Tezro was on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0258148673

I just had to pull the spare IO9 from my O350. But there's also an IO9 on eBay for $250.

I was mighty interested in this but chickened out due to the gfx err message.
Nice to see that it ended up at your place and was easy to get going.

What was the deal with that error message anyway, missing io9?

jan-jaap wrote:

deBug wrote: I was mighty interested in this but chickened out due to the gfx err message.

Hah, wait 'till you see this: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0270475112
Two Tezro's, in Sweden, for $1000.

What the f**!!
How can I have missed this one??
Dam you jan-jaap. You just ruined my day!
The location is in driving distance from me. I cant for the life understand how I could have missed that one.
Probably not listed for very long as hamei said.

/Harry

neko_xmms-1.2.11.tardist is now in Beta.

The new version was created in a collaboration between canavan and me.
There is no changes in the binary, only in the typerules and icons.
The New Xmms is now associated to MP3 files and play-lists.

If you Double click one or several MP3 files it will open Xmms, add the files to the playlist and play the first of the added tracks.
Alt-double click does the same but replaces any existing playlist.
The same goes for play-lists in M3U or PLS format.
If you prefer to use a menu, there is now an "Enqueue in Xmms" pop-up menu if you select one or more MP3s and right click. The Alt key works in the same way with the pop menu.
As usual you can also add files to Xmms by drag-and-drop of files or folders containing MP3s.

Some minor changes in the pop-up menu if you right click on the Xmms application icon itself, you can change track , pause etc, this has been there before I just changed some of the menu texts.
There is also brand new nice icons for the MP3 and playlist files.
canavan did a great job on the icons and is the one that should have most credit for the update as he created icons, tweaked some of my typerules and packaged it all.

Enjoy.

//deBug & canavan

tomo wrote: Xmms works good - shuffle play button now don't cause crash, icon is nice.

But one think: I have problem with output audio plugin, when I choose "irix audio plugin" as output xmms crashes immediately after start. But "SGI digital media output plugin works fine. (IRIX 6.5.26 on O2)

Thank you for testing.
Before we move out of beta, can you check if you browse a MP3 library, what icon does the MP3s have?

//debug

tomo wrote:

deBug wrote: Thank you for testing.
Before we move out of beta, can you check if you browse a MP3 library, what icon does the MP3s have?

//debug

At the start icons were old, xmms icon in iconmanager became in mediatools and was new. But after restart (maybe logout/ login can be enough) icons in fm became new.

Thanks for you info tomo, seems it working OK then.

You can probably move it out of beta Neko.

//Harry

Tried it briefly.
It is very very Vista like.

Considering it took six years between XP and Vista (partly because they had to scrap a version and start again).
I cant really see that they can have made much progress in a year and a half to consider it a new OS.
It is probably more like Vista 1.1
As the sales of Vista has been much less than what MS expected I cant stop thinking if this Windows 7 push is not simply a way for them to drop the Vista bad rap and forge ahead with a "new" product.

MS might have lost the edge? (I know there are plenty of people on this forum that will claim they never got it )
The now eight year old XP is still good enough for most people, myself included.
At work were I ran a lot of Virtual machines on the desktop and therefore needed more than 4GB RAM with means I needed a 64 bit OS to handle more RAM.
I installed XP 64Bits and found it to be a great OS!
XP64 is really the forgotten OS but as far as I am concerned, perhaps the best OS MS has made.

Back to Windows 7, it seems likely that they will include more eye-candy a-la Mac OS X bars etc. before the final version.
So it will probably be appealing but whether it will bring any new useful functionally still remains to be seen.

//deBug

pan1k wrote: Hey guys..

I'm trying to run QuakeI on my Octane2. It's got V6PRO Graphics and 1.2GBRAM. When I run the quake executable, it defaults to the none GL versions. Is that how it's supposed to be? When I run the GL version, it gets laggy and then crashes my system. Any tips out there for Quake to run right? I'm using the port from SGI.

It has a known bug that crashes the X server on Vpro gfx.
No fix for it afaik.

I was convinced this was an April fools joke.
But It's actually confirmed on SGIs and Rackables websites.
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2009/april/rackable.html
http://www.rackable.com/news/pressrelease.aspx?prid=672

Well they have been limping along on life support long enough I guess.
Still sad when it is a fact instead of a possibility.

I figured out how to get the fonts in IRX to display correctly if you are accessing your IRIX box using X over the network.

If you follow the Wiki entry "Headless desktop" http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/index.php/Headless_desktop
you will be able to remotely get the desktop of one your IRIX boxes and remote control it from a Linux or Windows Computer.
I use a thin client from HP with gives me a silent low power Xterminal to my IRIX boxes in another room

The HP can run XDMP out of the box but I have also added the Xnest and Xephyr software as the thin client is running Linux Debian so it is easily done.

One drawback though was that the fonts didn't display correctly over the remote X connection.
For example the Toolchest font was not italic as it should have been.
Most software run OK with the exception of IRIX "Software Manager" that gave me a couple of error messages of missing fonts. And sure enough, the list of software did not display correctly.

To fix this problem I enabled the font server on the IRIX box:

After I enabled the fontserver I had to tell Xnest, X or Xephyr to use it.
E.g to start Xnest and remote control my octane2 that had a running fontserver I would type the following on my Linux box:

The "tcp,octane2:7100 " tell Xnest to get the fonts over the network from the computer with host name octane2 port 7100
This did something for sure, but it was actually worse!
The fonts in sub menus of Toolchest was all garbled.
And so was some other menus in other software. It was unusable and much worse than running without the fontserver.

The alternative to using a remote fontserver on the IRIX box is to copy them to the Linux box so they are available locally.
It took me few hours of "how-to" reading before I eventually was able to get it working. I though I share it here should someone else want to try the same.


1 Copy the fonts
Copy the IRIX fonts from your IRIX box to your Linux box.
You will find them at /usr/lib/X11/fonts on your IRIX 6.5 box.
I copied the 100dpi, 75dpi, CID, Speedo and misc sub folders.

I choose /usr/share/fonts/X11 as the destination folder on my Debian Linux.

2 Register the fonts on the Linux box.
To get them registered with the Linux X server I used the command:
for every IRIX folder added.
E.g.
3 Tell the Linux X server to start using the newly added fonts.
I issued the command to tell the Linux X server to use the new fonts.

And now when I connect to IRIX computers with either X, Xnest or Xephyr the fonts displays correctly!


//deBug

Edit. fixed the destination Linux path to the fonts.

PymbleSoftware wrote: Copy and pasted from this thread into the wiki entry above.

Regan

Thanks Regan!

One day I'll learn how to edit the wiki..

sybrfreq wrote: I've yet to get the fonts going (as you can see) but why is the picture off in the system manager ? I thought those were bitmaps:

irix-remote.PNG

Could it be related to your garbled fonts in the toolchest?

I have the same graphic problem in my System Manager even after I fixed my font problems.
So they are probably not related.

//deBug

Thomas W. wrote: stupid question?... i don't know, but...

will this work with my O200? I ask, because there is no gfx-option in it...

It sure will!
Just make sure you are running XDM on your O200

GeneratriX wrote: How would you do that?

Diego, I don't want to clutter up this thread so I created a new thread and continued the discussion there.
http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16721846

stuart wrote: (Strangely, if I try to install any add-ons into Seamonkey, it always errors-out saying that it can't update the Chrome registry. All the files within my profile are writable (by me) so I'm not sure what's wrong here. Just me again, or some minor issue with neko_seamonkey?)

I have gotten the same error on a Windows machine with Seamonkey, a wild guess is that this happens when one tries to install a new add-on made for the never Firefox 3 system on an old Semonkey?
I haven't verified my guess with testing but at least the problem is not specific to the Nekoware build of Seamonkey.