The collected works of emgaron

ck_one wrote: as I am using my collection of SGI/NeXT/SUN stuff due to lack of time less and less and it does not seem to change in the coming years, I am tempted to put it up for sale.
[...]
I am located in Germany.

Have you considered offering these on the German SGI board ( http://www.mood-indigo.org/ ? Anyone there would at least have less shipping charges to deal with.

I doubt you'll get much for the Sparcstations - here in NL, they hardly fetch any money. In fact, I was planning on giving my Sparcstation 10 clone away for free. Even an Ultra 10 doesn't fetch much these days...

SAQ wrote: I'd think that 100 Euros would be more in line with the O2 or Indigo2 - but those are at American prices (Europe might be more expensive for the same SGI).

Without the GIO Presenter interface I'd put the Indy more at the E25-50 range.

For comparison: On the Dutch "Marktplaats", there are currently two Indys: 1xR5k/150 with XL24 and one R5k/180 with XL8. Both 64MB, 1GB HD with CRT, keyboard, mouse and camera. They were on and off there for 10-20EUR for the better part of two months by now and have not been sold as far as I can see.

Hey, now this thread has been bumped and given that I never "properly" introduced myself I might as well add something here...

So, what got me into SGIs... Long story. My computing experience started off with VIC-20/C64 in the eighties and I loved those machines - you could take them apart, they (especially the C64) could already be useful, yet they were so simple to tinker with. I finally got my first PC in 1992, as the C64 just didn't cut it anymore. I'd have loved to have gotten a Mac, but they were just unaffordable, so I settled for a 486. Coming from he C64 experience, the whole DOS/Win3.x experience never was quite satisfying - far too many "Why the heck is this thing doing this?" moments. Then I had my first contact with Suns at university (Linux shortly afterwards). Wow, what a difference - fascinating machines - finally machines again where I at least had the feeling that I control the computer, not the other way round[0]... That affection grew stronger during my first jobs, where - luckily - I always had a Sun on my desk and not a PC. While I went from Win3.x straight to Linux at home (since 1997), it took a few more years before I finally could afford my first Sun. And the second. And the third... ...you get the picture. That collection basically grew until the time I became a father and a home owner - both well known time and money drains... (...though I wouldn't have it any other way...)

All this time I was vaguely aware of other Unices and the corresponding hardware. I got some very limited experience with HP-UX at two workplaces - and of course I knew of SGI. I remember seeing an Indigo2 Impact and an Octane at some place once and I found them aweinspiring and I had heard many stories about their graphical capabilities and they looked nice to boot... I also almost bought an Indy at some point, but was put off by the vague legality with regard to the OS - and I decided to leave it at Suns.

That all lay pretty much dormant over the past years - until that fatal day last November, when a house nearby was sold and the previous owner apparently cleaned out everything. The resulting dumpster was just too tempting, so I went for some scavenging. I had already bagged an old P1 laptop and a DEC VX40 when I discovered the two largish purple computer cases at the bottom. From all I knew that could only be SGIs... I left them at first, in doubt whether I should dare to start yet another project I don't really have time for - but did start some reading (thanks Ian - already told you that your site was crucial... ). That really got me interested - so I went back the next day (thank God the night was dry) and fetched both of them... They turned out to be the two Indigo 2 Impacts I have in my signature - scratched, of course, but fully functional. I managed to get Irix 6.5 onto the R10k and got it running - and was hooked. Just the functionality of the set-up was amazing. I wish Sun's CDE had looked and worked like 4DWM back then - I might have skipped all my experiments with alternative window managers at the time... Anyway, this got me interested enough so I spared a little Christmas cash for a present to myself: The Octane. And to round it off, I got the Indy for free with the Octane which I was very happy with. Funny enough, so far I've spent more time at the Indy than at the Octane - the Indy is such a cute little thing, IMO...

So, these days I'm trying to sell off some old Sun and PC stuff and save a little money so I can upgrade the SGIs a bit more (maybe a V6 for the Octane at some point in the next 2-3 months). In any case, they've successfully conquered a place in my network/collection...

Cheerio,

Thomas

[0] That's a gripe I still have with Windows and - to some extent - with Apples (and even some newer Linux distros)

cris_adder wrote: From other posts on the forum it seems that the stand 13W3 adapter that is typical for a SUN will not work on the Octane...

YMMV, apparently - I have one Indigo 2 High Impact connected to a KVM -> Iiyama 19" monitor via a Sun adapter and that works just fine. It is, however, a VGA(m) -> 13W3(f) adapter, i.e. the full connection is:
I2 -> 13W3 cable (also Sun, I think) -> adapter -> VGA connector of KVM.

My Octane is connected in the same way, though using a simpler self-made adapter (RGB only) and an SGI 13W3 cable. This also works fine.
The only machine I could not get to work that way is my Indy.

dc_v01 wrote: "Yes, this again" is right. There have been many posts about this before, I guess I should add this to the wiki or something. Maybe it's already there?

Well, thanks to PymbleSoftware, there is now...

dc_v01 wrote: [emgaron: No reason that a SOG setup that works on an Octane shouldn't work on an Indy. Try playing with the setmon command, I think its "setmon -sg" to be certain that the SOG signal is being output.]

That's what I thought. However, due to some shuffling around in my computer area at home, the Indy ended up being my only SGI that's actually connected to an SGI monitor (GDM-17E21) and SGI keyboard/mouse, so that problem is solved for now. I'll keep your hint (thanks!) in mind, though - you knever know when I might feel like rearranging things again...

nekonoko wrote: [...]They're currently dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4 despite Firefox 3.X having on the order of 1.5 million 10.4 users, many of which are probably running G3 machines with no 10.5 upgrade path.

One of them would be me... I was actually surprised that 3.6 installed on my G3 . Do you have a pointer to some discussion or suchlike about dropping support? I was looking for it once 'cause I've heard this before, but failed to find it...

nekonoko wrote:

emgaron wrote: [...]Do you have a pointer to some discussion or suchlike about dropping support?[...]

Sure, here's a CNet article on the decision which also has links to the relevant posts on the developer's mailing list:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000056-264.html

Thanks - my search skills seem to suck sometimes... Looks like I have to come up with a plan for the G3 at some point - but then again, Apple's support for 10.4 is also limited (or gone already? I once searched for a life cycle policy on Apple's site - and failed to find it <sigh> ), so security updates aren't forthcoming, anyway.

dukzcry wrote:

emgaron wrote: Uhm - for all I know, the U5/10 use proprietary Sun memory, not standard EDO. At least I've never heard otherwise.

This source has otherwise point

Well:

This RAM isn't quite proprietary, but it's hard to come by.

Probably doesn't make too much of a difference in real life...

dukzcry wrote:

emgaron wrote: It got replaced with a dual PIII/550 - which was faster, less noisy and drew about 20W less...

I 've made perjury playful decision of having no more than 1x x86 gear in my location . Do not mind .

Oh, it's not that I cannot understand that - I wasn't too eager to make that swap, either - but at times, practical issues have to take precedence. At least the PIII is also running OpenBSD...

bhtooefr wrote: And a PogoPlug would be almost as fast as that Pentium III, would pull 5 watts plus the power consumption of hard drives, and isn't x86 - it's ARM (although Linux, not *BSD.)

As a firewall plus web server plus file server plus mail server plus DNS server plus DHCP server plus ....? Not from the descriptions I've found... ...and Linux is not going to be a firewall in my network... But you're right, there are more efficient options - that's on the TODO list...

While I have updated my sig, I haven't mentioned it here yet... This year brought a significant expansion of my Sun collection:

1) Earlier this year, someone in the town next to mine gave away a Sparcstation Classic and a U1/170 for free, which I duly collected...
2) When the sun4zoo in Germany closed down for good in June this year, I picked up a bunch of machines for free:
- Sparcstation IPC
- Sparcstation ELC
- Sparcstation LX
- Sparc Xterminal 1
- Sparcstation 1
- Sparcstation 1+
- Sparcstation 2
- Sparcstation 4/110
- Sparcstation 5/110
- Sparcstation 10 (with speakerbox... )
- U1E/170 with Creator
- U2/2x200 with Creator
- U5/400
- a bunch of keyboards, mice, micemats (yeah, the optical ones), spareparts, another SS1, SS1+ and SS5 for spares and other goodies (e.g. a new SBUS serial port extension - 8 ports, sealed in package)
Unfortunately, I could not take any of the monitors - simply no space...
I'm still busy going through this pile - so far, I've powered most of them on to make certain I retrieve all NVRAM data I can (several NVRAMs were already dead) and I've put an external battery on the NVRAM of the U2. The U5 will be failing soon, I suppose, as there are bulging capacitors on the motherboard - but then again, I only took it because noone else did... I'd love to do something with the ELC (maybe set up a diskless install and use it as a mail reading "terminal"), just because I think it's such a cute machine...

3) A while back, I bought a full set of Solaris 9 from someone - and got a free SS5/170 with it.

So, together with what I already had, I now have the majority of all sun4c/sun4m workstations covered - and a good part of the "old" Ultras, too (a U80 would be nice at some point - maybe even a U30 for completeness). Maybe not the most exiting part of what Sun has made (I've noticed many people like the Sun3's better for historical reasons and the newer Blades can be of more actual use, of course) - but for me, this collection pretty much represents what I have encountered "live" in my various educational/work places over the past 20 years, so I'm happy...

cb88 wrote: You wouldn't happen to have any *extra* optical mouse mats would you? I have 2-3 optical mice but no pads which leaves me stuck with ball mice X.x.

Not really, I'm afraid - with the extras, I just about have a pad for each of the mice I have (and some of them are already worn/scratched), sorry.

SAQ wrote: Note that there are two different optical mouse pads, and which one your mouse uses depends on what mouse it is.

True. IIRC, the blueish ones are for the Type 5 mice and the blackish ones for the Type 4. Or was it the other way round? I keep mixing them up... Used to be the typical practical joke, btw, to swap those when a new guy started at work...

SAQ wrote: Somewhere there's a PS file that you can print out to get a working optical mouse pad.

I've been experimenting with those and I've even messed with the PS to get a finer/more even pitch. So far, I have been unable to get those to work with either Type 4 or Type 5 mice. I was wondering whether it would be worthwhile trying to print that on a transparent, then put some aluminium foil underneath in order to increase reflection but never got round to it.

cb88, I can certainly send you the PS files if you like if you want to experiment with them.