The collected works of hamei - Page 61

foetz wrote: that's on diegel's ftp. although having a typo in the name

I seem to be blind thank you

Given the duck's extremely helpful contributions to anyone running an SGI machine, if I had one I'd be shipping it to him free. Prepaid.

jan-jaap wrote: ... if you think working at a startup is matter of taking it easy while you burn though someone else's money you've got it all wrong. Those who work for a startup usually work very long hours for a reduced salary (if any) -- the reward is that you will be (part) owner of a successful company if things work out, the risk is of course that you will be left with nothing if the startup doesn't take off.

That is exactly how all middle class small businesses were thirty years ago ... except without the vampire venture capitalists sucking the company's blood once you got going.

It's time to sharpen up the guillotines. Seriously. We don't need the fucking worthless finance "industry". They are nothing but vile blood-sucking thieves. They are a blight upon the Universe, a cancer upon the organism. It's time for chemotherapy ... with rat poison.

robespierre wrote: These notes are really great.
http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup

Robes, you are evil. May I suggest Matt Taibbi, Griftopia as an antidote to this swill ?

armanox wrote: For the prices that the 600MHz (and 2x600) come up for, I'd lean towards just buying a Tezro instead.

As the owner/operator of an O350 and the ex-owner of a Fuel, I would not. I wish the Octane were faster but even more, I wish I hadn't got so deep into the O3x crap. And I do mean crap.

In 1993 Alias started the development of a new entertainment software, later known as Maya which would become the industries most important animation tool. Steven Spielberg chose Industrial Light & Magic to provide the visual effects in 1993's Jurassic Park. In turn the animators at ILM picked PowerAnimator as the software of choice to model the huge prehistoric beasts. They delivered the very real looking dinosaurs with PowerAnimator and reaped the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

This is from a university web page ? Can any of these dipshits speak English ? I'd have got a 'D' and about thirty red pencil corrections for this in junior high school.

Aaah. "Dr. Wayne Carlson is the Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduates" .. people actually waste their hard-borrowed money on a degree from this so-called university ? This buffoon can't write even one complete sentence in English. He isn't qualified to be a dog-catcher. No wonder the US is sinking into a puddle of its own vomitous slime.

vishnu wrote: it says at the top of the page he cribbed it from the Alias website history section. ...

"Cribbed" ? As in, plagiarised ? So now the worthless dipshit not only can't write, but he's also a thief ?

Nice. Real nice.

followup : looked at several pages of his own writing. He's a Class III Buffoon. I'd flunk him out of a first-year remedial English course. Run-on sentences, his punctuation sucks, his statements are frequently horseshit -- how can a building be an "innovator" ? (gag), adjectives and nouns don't match .... what a twit. This is what is teaching in universities now ? Great. Just great. You'd be better off buying a phony diploma than wasting your money on this crap.

guardian452 wrote: We are really looking forward to the new JP... it is going to be sweet.

I dunno ... without Jeff Goldblum, how can you sit in the audience squeaking, "help me ! help me !" ?

foetz wrote: we?

sybr is now part of a larger social unit

astouffer wrote: Just think how cheap and easy it would be to counterfeit these

How do you know the one that sold was real ?

vishnu wrote:

mopar5150 wrote: ...they are usually hammered or missing parts.

It's a never ending source of amazement to me how bad of shape these things are in, given what their original owner's must have paid for them you'd think they would have cautioned their users against mishandling, if not deliberate abuse.

It is with great difficulty that I have restrained myself from kicking the crap out of my O350. I can easily imagine a time when restraint will break down .....

jan-jaap wrote: Maybe there's a market for this kind of stuff regardless of the brand ?

Where did I put that damned Pet Rock ? It's got to be here somewhere !

bittenbyte wrote: ... silicon graphics ceased to exist in the last turmoiled SGI (aka rackable) financial switch. leaving behind the IP from IRIX, XFS, and as a result there is no legal entity that can claim property of the source code.

Wrong ... ...

Kumba wrote: A lot of the proprietary stuff was reportedly spun off to an external entity called Graphics Properties Holdings Inc (GPHO) or such.

Patent fafnirs :

prnewswire - June 2010 wrote: Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc., an asset management company owning over 300 patents used for graphics, computer and display segments, is in the business of managing its patent portfolio and realizing value for its owners through licensing and other means. GPHI is owned by private investment funds and other institutional investors following the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Silicon Graphics.

Contacts:

Bradley Scher, President

Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc., (914) 235-1075

James M. Bollinger, Esq.

Troutman Sanders LLP (212) 704-6113

SOURCE Graphics Properties Holdings, Inc.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 03109.html

I would say you guys can put that "open source Irix" idea to bed now, for as long as there is breath left in the last lawyer on earth.

bittenbyte wrote: the desktop was not the most valuable part, it did make the experience unique, and usable from a graphics app.

Come again ? The desktop is the user interface. That's the only thing that is significantly different about Irix. Sure, the software was optimized for the hardware but that only counts when you are running a ground-pounding mighty 600 mhz cpu. Other than that, there's .000001 iota difference between Irix AIX HP-UX Solaris NetBSD FreeBSD Plan 9 and DOS.

the interface is what the user uses, thus the interface is what makes the experience different.

Oskar45 wrote: About 40% of Americans deny evolution. Sad.

US !=America.

About this security stuff ... I don't think I'll ever understand it.

For small users, since I own an O350 I now do regular backups. I don't keep films of me boinking a twelve-year-old boy in my computer. I'm not going to be Speaker of the House, either We do NOT do "online banking." In fact, i refuse to have a fucking bank account. Those people are documented thieves, crooks and liars. And we don't do anything in the ridiculous "Cloud". Whoever thought that shit up was an imbecile. The people who use it are schmucks. You can't make a bullshit idea "secure" and credit cards are the biggest bullshit idea on the planet.

So what's the worst that can happen if some sneaky bastard gets past the firewall and invades my computer ? I'll have to wipe the disk and run xfsrestore ? Already do that once a month anyhow due to flaky hardware.

If you are a larger company, how much sense does it make to be unduly paranoid about buffer overflows when SSL was a piece of shit for ten years, when you allow your employees to use USB sticks, when people are supposed to be doing business from their iPhones, when 1/3 of the mobile towers in the US are run by some nameless spooks, when the ignorant buffoons at the NSA can stomp all over the law while Congress snivels about "protecting Amurricans fwum tewwowists !" Like, I am 1000 times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning while surviving an earthquake in a Roman orgy than to be hurt by a tewwowist. But I have to give up 2/3 of my income and all my freedom to pwotect me fwum diss tewwible fwet to my way uv wife !

And let's not mention that the cops have murdered 319 people so far this year in order to protect me ! Keep me safe ! Safe safe safe ! Except from them ....

Fuck.

It just seems to me this whole security fetish is ridiculous. Normal safeguards, sure, but jesus. This is worse than ridiculous. It's insane.

It's a '34 wagon, they just call it a woody ...

rwengerter wrote: If someone is willing to port from Windows to Irix there is one more choice:
FreePCB: http://www.freepcb.com

Ouch. That would be a huge project. Windows and X are so different ... if you just want circuit diagrams and circuit boards, xcircuit builds nicely on Irix. And the guy doing it is pretty helpful if you have a problem.

Ian's site is definitely the most helpful for normal installs but as the offical tester for When Things Go Bad, here's a few things I noticed recently :

Installing to an O350, if you use a USB keyboard and mouse doing the graphical install, things will go nicely until you get to the Inst> prompt. Then the USB keyboard disappears. Oh crap. So the install by console method works fine but now you have a botched miniroot. A "fixup" blew the machine out of the water. 'C'ontinue or 'r'eload is probably a better choice. Better yet is to not bother with the graphics install, start straight from the console. They never did get USB working properly.

(I added < rm /etc/ioconfig.conf > to the shutdown script.)

6.5.21 is the earliest version that supports O350, by the way. Found that in the release notes, in case anyone searches for that in the future.

fx -> exercise -> sequential -> wri(te)-o(nly) takes about six hours with a 146 gb drive but still doesn't zero out the partition 1 miniroot. Ain't that sweet ? An Adaptec 2940 in a peecee will actually wipe the entire drive from its own BIOS. It's easy and works. There may be a way to do this from an Irix miniroot but I just gave up and put the 2U piece of shit in the closet. I hope it doesn't poison the moths.

On an Octane, graphical install from an external CD-ROM works well. However ... I have both an IDE DVD-Writer with a Yamaha adapter and a Toshiba (?) scsi dvd-rom removed from a dead O2. Trying the IDE dvd-writer first, everything went swimmingly until it got to the "List distributions" choice 1 under the Inst> prompt. "No Local CD-ROM Found." Wa ? Since it had just loaded the miniroot from the CD-ROM, I figured it was probably there. Choice 14-ed out, ran hinv. No cd-rom. Did "boot -f dksc(1,4,8)sash64" &c &c, booted fine to sash from the exact same cd-rom that 12 seconds previous it couldn't see to open the distribution.

Well crap, let's try the real scsi cd-rom. Maybe it's picky during the install phase.

Same result. What the hell ? Remembered that jan-jaap once said drives need to have parity enabled. Scrounged up a jumper and enabled parity on the drive. It had been disabled because with the parity jumper in place, I got lots of spurious error messages. With the parity jumper on the drive, it now 1) gave some error messages booting into Inst> but 2) saw the CD-ROM at the Inst> prompt and showed the drive with an hinv.

So, hell. If you get some weirdass problems from your CD drive during installation, it might help to play with the parity jumper. Didn't retry the IDE-Yamaha combo but it is probably the same. Next time I install (hopefully never) will test that. Pre-Inst> and post-install it works mostly fine without parity.

Along with USB, they never really got cd-rooms working reliably. You know, ...? well, anyway ...

After installation, both of them are a little flaky until you get some of the Irix utilities installed (mediad, maybe ?) so Be Prepared and Stay Calm. Then they seem to settle down.

Got 21 running, I have looked all over the innertubes and found either very basic installs with no desktop and barely a command line (can do 'ls' and 'cd' but not much else) or the "install standard" process that installs three different non-functional web browsers, five insecure web servers, two incompatible help documentation systems and two cycle-gobbling services that no longer exist. Not kidding. This

Inst> keep *
Inst> install required
Inst> install default eoe 4Dwm desktop_base x_eoe desktop_eoe
Inst> keep *.books *.man
Inst> install prereqs
Inst> go

will give you a very basic but completely working Irix desktop with no baggage. There's no System Manager so you either have to set up networking by hand (not a big deal) or install the desktopsysadm package right away. I discovered there's no command line way to add users and groups, except by editing the password and group file. That was kind of a shock. Software manager will be there tho, so adding exactly what you want is easy.

The nice thing about Software Manager as opposed to Inst> is that you can easily open up the packages and see what's inside, then choose what you want. Yes you can do this with Inst> but it's a pain in the rear to keep track of everything. Software Manager is okay.

This probably isn't for everyone (if I had never done an Irix install before I'd be screaming and pounding my head against the wall) but the results are good. Not gonna lie, 2 x 400 !> 2 x 800, but with a clean 6.5.21, it's not as sleepy as you'd think. And an Octane turns on when you push the button.

Although mine still bitches about the botched miniroot. I'm thinking of leaving it there as a security measure. Anybody who can get past that is welcome to the computer and any nekkid photos inside. They're probably hackers from the China government anyhow, we can't possibly hope to out-think those guys !

Extra credit question : who is stupider, the NSA or the people who believe their bullshit ?

foetz wrote: why did you run the disk exercise at all?

Because when it blew up and dropped me into pod, I figured I'd try to clean out whatever was making the mess in the miniroot. No luck with that, tho. I've got a 2940 around here somewhere, some day I'll wipe that disk and try again.

josehill wrote: Did you try repartitioning as an option drive (i.e. no swap partition), laying down a new filesystem mkfs, and then repartitioning as a root drive (or root/option drive) and laying down a new filesystem on the root or root/option drive? That process blows away the old swap/miniroot and has always cleared up any odd miniroot problems I've ever had.

I have done that in the past, and seems to me it does work (as long as you remember to synch the label However, this time I thought 'what the heck, let's run a test on this new-to-me disk and blow away the partitions at the same time.' The write exercise does ask where to start -- block 0 should be the beginning of the disk, yes ? Well, it ain't.

People getting a degree in computer science should be required to pass a course in remedial English. They could start with the declarative sentence.

calvin wrote: Likely for Hololens.

Looks like something else to me ... naughty boy, guardian

robespierre wrote: this is for your own good.

Yeah, I know. I'm sure it hurts them more than it does me, too.

I'm kinda sick of people protecting me from myself.

TeamBlackFox wrote: Indeed, it also had no concept of privilege separation.

Not exactly correct ... OS/2 has 'system' files which are in some way protected, I forget how.

But in practice, that is quite sufficient. This entire user-group-other thing on the desktop is an error of monumental proportions.

opcode wrote: Just as the subject says. I am looking for a reasonably priced card to connect a presenter 1280 to my Indy Cable would be great too!

I think you have to be careful ? The 1280 Presenter does not use the same card as the low-res Presenter ?

I could easily be mistooken but that's what I remember ...

jsloan wrote: If I load a linux distro on a mac laptop, just where am I setting that dial ?

Somewhere slightly past the first green mark. Most third-graders probably couldn't hack in.

Let's face it : there's no way to know what's inside any modern computer. But we do know the NSA, Google, Apple and Mickeysoft (among others) are not our friends. Therefore, any real security means, "don't put anything in your computer that you don't want painted on the bathroom wall down at the Greyhound station."

When I first read 1984 there were obvious flaws in the mechanics. But since then we've conquered those barriers. Between Wikipedia, Facebook and Bank of America, George would be smiling and handing out ceegars. People now spend goodly sums of time and money buying their own telescreens.

Who is number one ?

jsloan wrote: How would you avoid this ?

Standard, time-tested methods - trust no one, keep a low profile, don't make waves, keep any of yer damn individualist idears very very quiet, when they kick you in the teeth smile and say, "thank you, sir !". Them niggers all had it coming to them anyhow. Fucking protesters made me late for work, damn them. Vote republican, vote democrat, applaud Bruce Jenner who has always been a woman inside and all the other ridiculous politically-correct horseshit you are supposed to be occupied with. (I have personally always been a giraffe inside, but I can't afford the surgery ) But whatever you do, don't think about what the assholes you are voting for really do. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is really about 'free trade ! and a glorious future for all beings !' not a transparent attempt to control the world like a mentally-retarded twenty-first century Roman Empire. We have always been at war with Communism ! Bang that drum ! Wave that bloody shirt ! Run in circles crying and screaming The Tewwowists are cumming ! the Tewwowists are cumming ! Oh waht shall we do ?! Hep me ! hep me ! Lock me nekkid in a cage, butt-rape me three times a day, anything, just please sir keep me saaaafe ! Waaah ! waaah ! Go to lots of sports events and cheer loudly. Parrot all the stupid crap printed in the press. Join Faceblob and twitter endlessly about what your cat ate for breakfast. Be a good little serf and maybe you won't get disappeared. Buy lots and lots of Apple products, the more pretentious and useless the better. Avoid thinking at all costs, it shows in your eyes.

Just the usual.

Building a new Irix setup, at 6.5.21 now, it's clean and pretty and fast and it actually prints, which has been a nightmare ever since that cups fiasco. Installed MIPSPro 7.4.4. As a test I tried reproducing some of the most basic gnu programs in nekoware.

We're not up to gnumake yet, using Irix make

libsigsev went fine and passed all tests, too

m4 ... initially done as a simple ./configure --prefix=/usr/nekoware. That built and tested fine. Then I went and checked the neko release notes. Hmm, the original person configured as


Okay. let's try that.

Configured fine. Built fine. But the tests ...


Rebuilt it without the c++ portion, it now pases all the tests (except for the skipped ones, which get skipped, no biggy.)

Not sure what is going on here ? Is this a version thing, where this version is newer than what's in nekoware, so it's doing new things ? Or doesn't it matter for what we normally do, which is just running autoconf, so failing many of the c++ tests never showed up ? Or have there been errors hiding in the most basic nekoware for a decade cuz the original guy never ran make check to see these failures ?

Anybody got any idears ? As far as I can think, the lack of c++ won't affect us but informed opinion is welcome.

jpstewart wrote: I don't see any loss of functionality by skipping the C++ stuff.

Thank y'all. I didn't see a problem either but would rather run the question by some people who know what they are doing Also rebuilt it without the C++ "support".

Anyhoo ... kinda related. Thought while I was here I'd rebuild the basics at the newest version levels. Are there any known gotchas ? Stuff like this scares me :

delorie.com wrote: The last release of libltdl used some symbols that violated the POSIX namespace conventions. These symbols are now deprecated, and have been replaced by those described here.

Use of the word "deprecated" gives me shivers, usually it means "no longer works" .... The newest libsigsev built okay and gmake 4.1 too but I'm wondering if there are known hidden gotchas in any of the basic tools ? Autoconf, libtool, gmake, etc ?


btw, a clean 6.5.21 without the triple-layer of spooge is very nice. 2x400 works very good, I don't even feel too sad about speed.

armanox wrote: Paranoid much are we?

We didn't get our turn in the Kool-Aid line so we think power that would give Joseph Goebbels a hard-on as big as a telephone pole is not a good thing. But hey, you're probably right, our Leaders are such honest, ethical people concerned for nothing but our welfare that any doubts are purely paranoia. No one in government or the corporate world (is there a difference ?) would ever screw us over. Absolutely not. No, never. Well, hardly ever ...

Yes ! Although we can barely keep up with the dizzying flurry of changes, after five years there really is a new version of NEdit ! And it builds easy right out of the box ! And (so far) all the usual Irixxicisms are intact ! The lazy bastards didn't re-architect it for gtk2 !

So far I'm happy with it. This is a one-hour report but hey, in these days of software that doesn't build on Irix by developers who've never heard of Motif, it's pretty cool !

The only thing I'd change is the About screen says it was built on an SGI 6600 server. Anyone got one of those ? My collection is lacking Maybe I'll hunt down that string and change it to Octane. Or O2. Or anything but 6600. How plebeian.

I'd dist it up but Mr Octane is undergoing puberty, so that's not a good idear. Perhaps someone else can be convinced tho ... it's cool. Mikey likes it

uunix wrote: I'd like to congratulate England ladies reaching the Semi final of the Women's World Cup. Playing better than the men at the moment.

But do they put out on the first date ?

TeamBlackFox wrote: I don't understand why one needs a GUI editor? Vi(m) never hurt nobody!

My Assistant is a neanderthal. She refuses to learn keyboard "shortcuts" or any real text editor. So, as Richard used to say, "if da nigger want da poosy, den da nigger use da graphical editor."

And saves the files in DOS format, too.

Ted is in line for building next

Due to guardian's ruthess review, we saw San Andreas last night instead. It left me wondering :

Do helicopters really have "Hover" buttons ? If so, why not add "Forward", "Back", "Left" and "Right" buttons and get rid of the $100,000/year pilot ?

Are search-and-rescue guys stupid enough to put their right arm underneath a car hanging vertically by a thread ? The only machinery movers dumb enough to do that are named Lefty.

Are the special effects people capable of making rolling motions ? In both earthquakes I've seen (8.4 and 6.9) the ground rolls, not jerks. And you can't run on it. You can barely walk. And buildings sway twist and break, they don't explode from the inside out. Plus un-reinforced masonry has been illegal in the Bay Area for decades even in one-story buildings.

Should something be done about steroids in Hollywood ? Steve Reeves was bad enough but these cardboard cutouts are over the top.

I haven't stolen a car since 1975, but doesn't everything have steering locks now ?

The rift down the middle of the state ... uhh, yeah. Nice. But could the cgi guys please put a little jog in it here and there next time they do that ? It's ridiculous enough without being straight as an arrow.

Gravity. I'm not current on earthquake science but is gravity suspended for the duration ? The 250 foot high tsunami which hit SF ... after it destroyed everything, wouldn't the water have receded back into the Bay ? As in, immediately ? If you've ever driven up Divisadero you know the city is not exactly flat.

Has anyone here tried to swim with boots on ? Or is that reserved for cardboard cutouts ?

The flag ... gag me with a spoon. But the line about "FEMA, the National Guard, and all our disaster preparedness teams are rushing to the site" made me burst out laughing. Just like Katina ...

Tinfoil beanie bonus question : several seismology experts have explained that with modern buildings, this kind of thing is practically impossible. Modern buildings are very strong and resistant to these kinds of events.

So would one of these earthquake experts like to explain building 7 at the world trade center again ? You can't have your cake and eat it too.

With a 110 million dollar budget, was there not enough money to have a normal human being with two eyes preview this thing ? Or do they make it silly on purpose, so we know it's just a ridiculous movie instead of something to be worried about ?

It was kinda fun to watch tho. No blood and gore, nice enough people, fair amount of bouncing boobies, even the villain was just a cowardly doofus. And the hero stole a helicopter, a truck, an airplane and a boat, all in one movie. Not too bad

zagnut wrote: I've decided I just want to use this as an NAS RAID.

I know it's rude to tell people their ideas are ... errr ... not good, but :

Octane makes a terrible file server. They are big (which you don't care about cuz it's attractive - okay), loud (not good) hot (not good), noisy (really not good), have a crap selection of disks (sca scsi only, slow transfer rates, only three internal disks, even the sata adapters that work on O3x do not work on Octane) ... basically, that's a bad job for an Octane. There's a good reason you can buy those external scsi raid enclosures for nothing. That's what they are worth.

I will avoid the Loonix - vs - Unix subject entirely

Will I be able to access the array from a Windows machine? I've yet to look up the partitioning types for Irix. I know theres 1, maybe 2, Linux distros that will run on the Octane. For simple NAS and RAID, that should work fine hopefully.

To be realistic, for a server these days in a mixed network, you really want Solaris 11. If you want to go second-best there's the BSD's. Samba sucks the big ten-inch. And Swervices for Yewnix is awful. I've used it in Real Life (tm). Four years of bread and water, ten lashes daily. If you were sticking with all Unix and pseudo-Unix computers, NFS would be great and Irix and even Loonix does that good. But when you add Windows .....

If you just want a nas, no other services, then one of the BSD-based point-and-click appliances looked pretty nice. I tested about five, one of them seemed okay. ZFS. A couple of people here are using the HP microserver happily. Sata disks. Smallish. Quiet. Very quiet. Low electricity usage. Two each gigabit interfaces and a spare pci-express slot for whatever. A thousand times faster and more capable than an Octane for that job.

Anyway, the point is you won't be happy using an Octane for this. Octane makes a great desktop but a piss-poor file server.

guardian452 wrote: That said, I do know how to follow instructions

That is likely to be a hindrance

This is one of my pet peeves. Instructions these days for computing (in general, IBM excluded) SUCK !!!

This is one thing I despise about Solaris in particular. 400 web pages about "how-to-do-X". Three of them are correct. With the ridiculous 'release early - release often' philosophy of stewpidity (and in Sun's case, the fact that the primary requirement for employment was documented ADD), what was true on wednesday has been deprecated by thursday. But no one dates their instruction pages or documents exactly WHICH version they are talking about.

I hope the maxx instructions are better than usual.

You know, if it ran on Solaris that would be a real inducement to use that o.s. Solaris is great but their desktops are all pure unadulterated pigshit.

commodorejohn wrote: Besides, it seems like it would be much simpler to just port Basilisk to IRIX.

I think it's in nekoware. If not, in someone's "other contributed binaries" folder ... pretty sure I've seen it.

This is as good a time as any to mention that there's a LOT of stuff in nekoware. It's not all emacs or vim text editors or wackadoodle perl scripts to order ice cream, triggered by ambient temperature readings. It's mostly useful applications.

zagnut wrote: For my photography needs, as a redundant storage device, it should serve well.

There's not as many programs for grafix manipulation as Windows, but there are some. Photoshop is several versions back but works okay. There's Eclipse, which I never got the hang of but seems real capable (and it's free.) Both Image Magick and Graphics Magick are in nekoware. I like graphics magick and use it a fair amount. Illustrator is old but works. There's some more esoteric stuff like Studio Paint, Matador and Amazon Paint floating around, plus Shake. We collaborate here between Windows and Irix doing advertisements, quotations, brochures, greeting cards, phony documents, and other stuff. For some things Windows is faster, for others Irix. Everything gets checked on Windows before it leaves tho, since 90% of the world uses Windows. Windows and Irix display photos differently.

I have not been successful at getting any of the Linux programs to work well. Scribus, Inkscape, Abiword, all a big disappointment. Gimp is maybe okay but I haven't used it in years. They all seem like they got to a certain stage then quit ... right when the program was starting to show promise. I got tired of wishin' and hopin' ...

Umm, about installing Irix ... it's a bitch. About the third time you do it, it's not so bad. But by then you are pickier and keeping it from installing crap you don't want is a struggle so it's still a bitch. Not sure what to recommend about that but 6.5.22 is where I'd say you'd be happiest. It's got the nicest stuff and feels the most responsive. You could selectively upgrade certain systems later if you need to.

Installing Linux is not going to be a joy either. And all the applications are not going to come off a repository ready to go. You'll have to build everything. Oh goody.

Buying a disk with Irix installed is probably your best bet and even cheapest. You can just pop it in, set up networking and start using it. Anything else is going to be a struggle.

guardian452 wrote: Years of using Apple products have reduced my tolerance and patience levels below what is required for getting FreeBSD going on a laptop, at least a thinkpad.

I'm beyond caring whether things work out of the box or not. It's when even the bloody instructions don't work that I flip out.

And that's way too often these days, too. Something is flat-out wrong with people now.

vishnu wrote: And it doesn't complain about the xserver missing the XSGI extension?

Don't know about the program but the website makes me ill

Along those lines ... got tired of writing into the wrong terminal so I've been using xterm for remote and winterm for local. Better. (Yes I know you can do named varieties of a window with different characteristics but ... oh well. Maybe next time.)

But xterm has a really bad scroll bar. So I came across another Muquit Motif program, an xterm with a Motif scroll bar. Much nicer. Attached. I call it mxterm but you can name it anything you want. And I haven't conquered the Xdefaults yet, so it's a plain grey with Irixxy decorations.

Oh. It's mips 3 so should (?) work on older Irixxes and doesn't need any nekoware dependencies.

foetz wrote: mips3 does however let it run on, well, mips3 machines

Yeah, I told it to be mips3 but computers have a habit of ignoring me. And I have no way to test. So no promises ...