The collected works of hamei - Page 64

the continuing adventures of creating pdf's under Irix ...

In case anyone ever comes along who wants to make pdf's in Irix : somebody famous said "Life's wide, there's room enough to back up and take another run at it ..." so that's what we did.

neko_ghostscript 8.51 worked for me in the past. So I grabbed the release notes (thank you, voidfoo). Backed off optimization to -O1. It built, as I hoped. Almost said "as expected" but them days are long gone.

Still had problems with building pdf's, and I know it worked when we ran win2k on the Box of Doom, so ditched the PostScript driver we were using on Winders and got one directly from Adobe. They invented it, so they should have a reliable print driver, yes ?

pstill still kacks but now ps2pdf can at least create vanilla pdf's. Not sure why there are still font problems with 8.51, it worked before, but may as well row upstream while investigating : there's an 8.71 in nekoware but it has cups and a lot of other things I don't want so, build from scratch !

Kept the -O1 optimizing flag. ./Configured --without-stupid-crap. gmaked ...


in three or four different places. Jeeze.

Did the foetz trick (thank you foetz) and made that


Don't they have any rules for this shit ? If I had these little idiots writing APT programs I'd scare the crap right out of their little drawers ... you do not do shitty code when it drives a machine.

Tangent : I was the house honky in a joint venture in dongbei. It was a flaky joint venture like all of them but kinda fun. The 'partners' already knew everything, of course, because they had these Roosky tube-driven controls. We brought in some K&T's from a McDonnell-Douglas auction (the US made decent stuff, once upon a time. And we had a middle class, too. Hard to believe now ...) Kick Roosky ass all day long, then go kick Jap ass at night K&T D controls, nice controls, better than anything they sell today.

My lads were like Chinese everywhere, they don't believe in checking anything. Kind of like the dipshits writing Loonix software. I'm forcing them to single-block through the first run of a new program, and I can see there's a massive error a few blocks ahead. They never listen to me so it's time for a little payback. The part is a transmission housing for a small car, mounted on an angle plate, next step was a 2" drill that was supposed to rapid up to .1" away from the part, then drill.

Except someone misplaced a minus sign.

So I casually stepped back a few paces, asked if they were sure, "Of course we're sure ! We wrote this program ! We're stars !" zooo I said, "okay, poosh dee button then" and kind put my hand in front of my face cuz when 8,000 lbs of column drives a 2" drill right through a part and an inch-thick angle plate at 400 inches per minute, the resulting destruction will get your attention.

I don't think they liked me after that

Anyway, with these errors corrected, 8.71 builds. Not sure why pstill doesn't like the Word-Acrobat-produced postscript files but ps2pdf now functions ... inspired by the wreck :

Chinese fonts still blow it up but we're making progress.

I also notice that the whole font things is ... peculiar. The test part was a Word doc using some strange-ass font, on purpose. Somehow that got substituted into Arial. Hunh ? I thought postscript was supposed to embed any strange fonts that weren't part of the base set ?

btw, tried 9.05 (tons of errors) and 9.16 (same), put them aside for the moment while I struggle with double-byte fonts. For the moment, 8.71.1 is mostly functional. But we shall return

This info is kinda hard to find on the innertubes so I'll put it here :

Sometimes you want an individual part of a tardist. You can un-tar a tardist but that still doesn't give you anything you can use, it's all packaged up in a non-extractable manner. So the dumbass way (patented by /me) was to install the 'dist, copy what you wanted, then uninstall.

Well, that's dumb.

This can all be done from a command line and it isn't that hard :

As a user (just in case you screw up, so inst doesn't write crap into your system by mistake), here's the format :

inst -f (full path to the tardist) -r (full path to wherever you want to put the stuff) -V rulesoverride:on

Then the usual

keep *
install *
go

will extract the entire tardist to your -r location.

You can extract a single file this way also, but for smaller tardists I don't bother. If you do need to, then the usual < inst > commands will work to list the files, choose a single one to extract, and so on.

I guess it's a little late now but it would have been a big help to have just a set of nekoware release notes in some ftp directory. That way people wouldn't be downloading 20 megabytes of stuff just to get the release notes ... Thanks again, Mr Neko, for hosting all this junk. Without it, we'd be toast

smj wrote: Given that write support for XFS appeared after ZFS support was well established in FreeBSD, I'm not terribly surprised they never saw significant uptake of XFS...

Different animals. I've got them both here, no way in hell would I use zfs for a desktop. But it's grrrrr-ate for swervers.

Well, more or less. For a small server I'd still probably prefer xfs. Zfs just has too much crap in it for lightweight uses.

chicaneuk wrote: Sadly multimeters and oscilloscopes are not something I've ever owned or been familiar with - not an electronics guy at all

If you're going to get one or the other, don't be misled by the apparent "complexity" of an oscilloscope. In general they are really easy to use and tell you much more about what's going on than a meter. And the current craze for digital meters can be wrong-headed. Inexpensive digitals can't even see fast-moving changes.

Simple example : you check the voltage of your power supply. Digital meter tells you 4.93 volts. Cool, within spec ! Oscilloscope shows a base of 4.93 volts but more noise than the dining hall of a Chinese university. You need new caps !

An inexpensive 20 mhz one would probably be fine for anything you're likely to do. Just don't pick up one of those thirty-ton antique Tektronix thingies for $5 at the surplus store ... they look cool but not worth the hassle. You want small and light.

commodorejohn wrote: And hey, computers are just glorified TVs for a whole bunch of people now, so who cares about anybody actually trying to do work on them!?

There ya go ! 42.

gocram wrote: HP's x86 Plan to Replace Itanium and HP-UX with x86 and Linux

Because that worked so well for SGI ! Competing with Dell is the ooonly way to fly ! Everyone who tried it is rolling in money, making greenbacks hand over fist ! HP customers paying HP Bucks will be so happy to wait an hour on hold so they can talk to Raj when they need support !

It'll jack up the stock price for a couple weeks tho ... just long enough for Meg to get her bony claws into a couple mil. That's what the US is all about now, right ? Innovation ?

^ bump. Dumped the previous reply because it was no longer accurate. ^

Firewire works with Octane, too. It might be a little easier to find than a small scsi external.

So I'm maybe not the dumbest person on the planet (you can tell that because I'm not running for president) but close. Real close.

The good part is, ghostscript 8.71.1 builds easily with MIPSPro - at least, if you aren't loading up with cairo, cups, and all that other crap. And it creates pdf's easily. Does a nice job, too.

The part that had me tearing out my hair was if the pdf had Chinese fonts, the viewer would segfault and crash immediately. So I'm stupidly wasting my time with libiconv, libintl, all that crap. I thought ps2pdf was having a problem mapping that font to something it could use.

Umm, when I opened the test pdf on Windows, it was perfect


Dumbass. Xpdf was crashing because it couldn't find a suitable font to use. The pdf was fine. It does seem as if xpdf could find a nicer way to warn you that a font is not available, however.

The good news for Irrixxers is, ghostscript 8.71.1 is easy to build. You have to set it to -O1, other than that, no problems (no cairo, no cups, and much of the other stuff disabled here tho. I don't use jbig or that other dick-waving junk.)

Yay ! We will return to 9.16 later. For now, time to bask in unearned success

foetz wrote: ... the key point here is, you need the stuff from the 2 dev cds even if you're not going to use mipspro

... and if you're going to all the trouble to find the dev CD's, then why not walk the extra foot and get MIPSPro ? gcc is a linux thing. Why put a Chebby six-cylinder in your Jag ?

guardian452 wrote: ... we are talking thinkpad here, which means windows, which means games ...

Ouch ! InDesign, Catia, Illustrator, Photoshop, Framemaker, NASTRAN, lookout ! The end is nigh

Most games are made for 16x9.

You run full-screen ? You'd fit right in here. Why do they make such a big deal about "it's multi-tasking !" if people are going to run everything fullscreen ? May as well use DOS. i also think 16:9 sucks, especially with that dumb taskbar wasting an inch off the bottom.

josehill wrote: Lesson: don't believe anyything you read, even if it comes from a "reputable" source, and especially if it can be interpreted as advancing an agenda.*

I told you we agreed on most things, you just won't admit it

The stories about Amazon are more likely to be (fairly) accurate than most, tho, since that is what the US is all about now. Money money MONEY ! MINE ! I WANT IT ! ALL OF IT ! AND BY GOD I"M GONNA GET IT, NO MATTER WHAT !!

The country is totally out of wack and it's not just the 1%-ers (where's yer colors now, Mr 1%-er ? ) If the main body of the populace didn't go along with that stupid shit about how money is the measure of all things, then it wouldn't be this way.

Face it, we've lost it. And Mom Nature is going to clamp down hard on the stupid-fuck mistake that was human beings.

* cf. NYT, Orville Schell was their go-to guy for years about China. The dimwit doesn't speak Chinese, he knows doodly-squat crap about ANYTHING here, he couldn't even buy a train ticket by himself, his entire claim to fame is that his brother is an okay guy and Or-ville married a slanty-pussy, well whoop-dee-doo. He's an ignorant know-nothing dork but as far as the Times goes, whatta guy !

And oh yeah, he's rabidly anti-commnist. I wonder if that could have anything to do with it ?

Dipshits.

smj wrote: You know better, hamei - you do that because you want it to run reliably... /me runs

But if you want something reliable, you don't get an English car in the first place ... gcc in Irix is like plastic tits - looks good from across the street but when ya get around to driving it, it's just not right.

If you don't get stranded at least once in a while, it's not a Jag

guardian452 wrote: I've been sticking the taskbar on the right side for years. My thinkpad however has such a shortage of pixels I have it set to auto-hide completely.

Maybe one of the reasons I like 4Dwm is the launchpad. Or toolchest. Or whatever they want to call it. First thing I did with Warp 4 was ditch that arfing taskbar thingy. (Second thing I did was go back to Warp 3)

Taskbar, ugh.

guardian452 wrote: When it's open what do I care what direction it's facing?

You don't want everyone to know how special you are ? Oh man, what a waste of a good Apple

foetz wrote: nice, seems you're getting the hang of it more and more

Thanks for the compliment, but I'd rather hit cows in the head with a sledge hammer ! This kinda sucks. Every step is a battle ...

Here's a wrapup, if there's ever anyone else out there who wants to create pdf's within Irix, a little free data for your viewing pleasure :

Adobe never made a Distiller for Irix. They made one for Sun and AIX but we got left on the doorstep in a basket.

Pstill worked for me but crashed if I tried to use Chinese fonts. It converted the demo files okay and maybe could have been tweaked to do dbcs or maybe it was just me. But I had already used ps2pdf a lot and it works well.

If you are happy with a waddling welfare Octane (she's one of the Butt sisters), then just grab ghostscript 8.51 from nekoware. It works.

I have personally been happy with an Octane free of the layer upon layer of klugey stuff added since 6.5.22. It's a lot of work but makes a much nicer computer. So this is what I did :

Ghostscript 8.71.1 builds right off the bat, no tricks needed. The main point is to set optimizing to -O1. This is what I used, plain-jane, shamelessly stolen from canavan


Any criticisms of the environment are appreciated ...

then a configure, much of this I don't have but just in case, we disabled it anyhow



I initially tried to restict the printer drivers - I don't own an Office Depot, drivers for every printer ever born aren't useful to me - but linking failed when I tried that. Since these are going to go away later anyhow, I surrendered, Dorothy. Try it at your own risk.

From this point it builds fine with MIPSPro 7.4.4. Probaly earlier ones too but I don't have an earlier one.

Did gmake install, then here's the trick part : you can go into /opt/homeboy/share/ and delete everything under ghostscript. It will still create pdf's. It will still create pdf's with Chinese fonts And you won't have a bunch of phony pseudo-fonts cluttering up your computer. Or sudo-fonts, if you're a pseudo-Unix kinda guy/gal

There's some useless scripts in /bin, too. And a bunch of paths that don't exist in the main ghostscript executable. Maybe drag out the hex editor later ... or wait, there's another configure switch to try ... maybe another day.

Ran tests, pdf's so far seem good. Ghostscript alas does not have a < gmake uninstall >. Also, < gmake check > runs through whatever routine it has but reports nothing. If these guys built bridges I'd swim.

One further check, built mgv (motif ghostscript viewer) with no problems after the ghostscript flab removal operation. And , the odd thing is, it displays the chinese font test which < showps > complains about.

I need to install some CID dbcs font or another later, but for now, this is okay. xpdf segfaults if it can't find a suitable font but our customers all use Windows so I'm safe for now.

Maybe 9.16 some time in the future.

Oh. Attached is the Adobe ppd file which they suppply for Windows. They call it Distiller. I'm thinking of installing it under Impressario for creating plain ps files. I'm not that confident that a specific printer's ppd is the best way to create universal postscript files ... had to hunt for this sucker for an hour, so hope this saves someone some grief.

That's enough computing for this week. Hope y'all have a loverly Sunday

edit: Oh wait - I lied. 8.71.1 requires the foetz-fixes above. But they are documented earlier in the thread. It's a simple edit to four or five files. Brain-failure

foetz wrote: what happens if -O2 or higher is used?

You are a bad influence ...

Another run-through did inspire me to try a couple more things ... if you allow it to build the init scripts into the executable, then you don't need that honkin' big directory of mostly-useless scripts. So lose a little, save a fair amount. And I ditched all but two or three printers - I figured it might get pissed if there was no output device, so I picked a plain old Laserjet and IBM Proprinter, those are minimal and pretty standard. Dropped the path way back to JUST the real SGI fonts (and even there I ditched Amie, Laura, Rock, Cave, that other shit that no one anywhere has ever used.) 400 fonts just means you have to paw your way through ten pages of lists to find the one you want. No normal human needs 400 fonts.

Built again at -O1, still working.

I don't know why I bother with gmake check. I hope at least if it crashes it will say something.

okay since you asked i can deliver 3

Thanks, I should ditch those I guess ... they crept in as solutions to some particular problem, then never crept out again. It's probably better just to use them when needed, hunh ?

Onward and upward !

edit: Okay, I had to change one more thing. The "ProductName" is now "Irix Ghostscript". We have just as much right to claim it as gnu does, Artifex actually wrote the thing

sgifanatic wrote: ... the mindlessness of *most* actions by the main characters. It just makes the whole thing stupid and unreal.

If anything, stupidity and mindlessness make it more real

You need to remember - you're in a country that's running Ted Cruz for president.

foetz wrote: oookay gxfill has some issues but that doesn't mean you have to build everything at -O1

Yah, but this is an interim step. Eventually I'd like to go with 9.16. Or whatever they're up to by the time I get there. So fighting the smaller points here is sort of a waste.

I'm happy as a clam that this works tho. Creating pdf's is pretty much essential these days. Thanks for the assistance

Oh. Something to make us feel better (schadenfruede ?) -- attaching a shared file from a remote server crashes Windows Firefox. Boom ! gone kerplowie. Repeatably

commodorejohn wrote: Speaking of MIDI, is there any decent lightweight general-purpose sequencer application for *nix that could run on IRIX?

Icon Catalog -> Media Tools -> Syntheditor

There's also Rosegarden 2.1

For really simple, I think you can use Midikeys to record.

There's more than that, but that's all the names I can remember off the top of my head. Cecilia ? What does Cecilia do ?

sornywrx wrote: I can use USB KB and mouse on the Fuel, right?

Yes. But if you can, ps/2 is better. With usb, if you make any changes, you'll be single-usering in and deleting /etc/ioconfig.conf a lot. I even considered making a shutdown script that would do that every time it turned off, just in case.

Also, the USB versions of the SGI keyboards kinda suck. The letters wear off if you look at them crosswise. I have three here, all the same. Eventually I will become a touch typist

And the mouse is a piece-of-junk logitech. Logitech is pretty much garbage, wears out in two to three weeks. I've gone through three of their trackballs now. The old ball mouse is kind of a pain in the butt but it works ... and works ... and works.

And when you install ? (Next question is, "where can I get Irix ?") DON'T go to 30 immediately. I am so much happier with the Real Irix Experience and it runs soooo much better. The shit they did post-6.5.22 is awful.

In fact, it would be a bitch for a first-time install but if you can avoid a lot of the junk they bundled into the "keep standard" installation, it would be good. Netscape 4.8 is no longer relevant

If you are used to Windows, don't bother with any of the browsers, they'll just piss you off. Install rdesktop and run your fave Mickeysoft browser remotely. It will save you a lot of grief and a lot of worthless garbage on your nice clean Fuel. Keep the garbage on the MickeyMachine, where it belongs

Nekoware is great but ... if I were thee, I'd hold off any installing any until you've used real Irix apps a while. Otherwise you may as well get a peecee and stick Loonix on it. So many posts here asking "where can I get a fossy xyz ?" to which the correct answer is, "Icon Catalog -> Media Tools". Irix comes with a ton of built-in goodies. For 95% of what you do, you don't need gnulix crap.

ajw99uk wrote: So move it to the side, leaving the remainder of the screen closer to a 16:10 ratio, maybe better if you use a large taskbar.

I don't have this problem. I use Irix. Every day, all day

guardian452 wrote: We are getting dangerously close to politics here ...

No danger of that. There is no politics in the US. It's the biggest clown show on earth.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a font viewer for fonts (especially Type1) that are not installed ?

There's several for fonts that are already installed, but how do you look at an uninstalled font to see if it's something you want to keep ?

Found one program that claims to do that (gfontview) but it's gtk, I'll build that if I have to but would rather not.

Oskar45 wrote:

hamei wrote: There is no politics in the US. It's the biggest clown show on earth.

And certainly China is on par.

Alas, China can't hold a candle to the US in this area No one anywhere can compete with the buffoons populating the US Congress.

I guess that's a good thing ....

foetz wrote:

Trippynet wrote: That's a nice, standard SGI keyboard and ball mouse - not a Logitech one. I exactly the same pair here for my Fuel and Indigo2 and they work fine (despite their age), so long as you clean the rollers every few months of course!

same here. the best i ever had. i have quite a bunch of them and loved them from day 1

The USB keyboards have a nice light touch - I know that's not popular but some people might like it. I like them okay but the letters rub off. You're not supposed to need the letters but still ... that's crap.

A quick look shows that the famous SGI resellers have tested granite keyboards with return privilege for less than fleabay. Since they are in biz to provide SGI parts, might want to look there.

And better yet, both price lists I looked at had the slab keyboards for even less than the smaller dished ones. The slab was my favorite, I thought it had an even better feel than the mid-period granite ones.

On the mouse front, I'ma trackball guy. But I picked up a no-name usb vertical mouse that was not as big as a house. Cost $5. It was pretty nice. For keyboard, ps/2 is better. But for mice, not as many choices

I'm afraid to try it on the Octane - the family jewels would be at stake - but the best mouse I've ever used is a Mickeysoft wireless thing. Two buttons and a scroll wheel that doubles as a third. It's almost round, like a slightly mashed half-ball, but with a cutout on the left side for the thumb. Really comfortable. Optical, wireless, teflon pads on the bottom, fits the hand great. It's a wonderful mouse.

wenp wrote: Are you looking only for something that can be built on IRIX? If you don't like GTK, are you hoping for a Motif interface?

Thank you, after hours of struggle today it's time to give up on the wonderful Yewnix and do this in Windders, the bazaar is crap. I wasted several hours on this worthless, incompetent, stupid shit. I'll spare you the blow-by-blow.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I have the wired version of that Microsoft mouse, if it's the model I'm thinking of. It is my mouse of choice, not just because of what you said, but also the nice "clicky" scroll wheel with real detents instead of sloppy sliding. It calls itself the Laser Mouse 6000.

You made me go look. We have the "Sculpt Ergonomic" which looks like the cut-rate version of your Laser 6000. The 'Sculpt Ergonomic' was about $50. Definitely nice mouse tho. It should work on a 3x-series machine. I've never had much luck with those ps/2-usb converters or I'd risk the jewels on an Octane test

The Assist quit bitching about her hands hurting, so we splurged for the companion-piece keyboard. Mehhh, keyboard not so much. But the mouse is great.

foetz wrote: thanks for the guide. if you just wanna share it without going through creating a correct nekoware tardist you could also just attach the compressed package

Nekochan also has a /contrib directory structure with a ton of non-nekoware stuff (as foetz well knows, he's the leader in that field ) Contact Mr Neko and he'll set you up.

I knew I remembered something about this ...

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=16726484&p=7349428&hilit=stickynotes#p7349428

so I took advantage of jimmer's absence

to throw a compiler against it, came out with

for those what's adwenturous, here's the binneries and readme.1st

but one thing ... read up on the vulcan death grip first. Jimmer may not welcome this ghost-ex-closetus

duck wrote: Damnit, hamei, you ninja

There's plenty of room here for a team ... maybe you can get it to not seize up the desktop ?

duck wrote: Notes then? I have no issues running it since I first installed it...

Okay le, went back to jimmer's preferred opto of -O2 instead of -O3, it seems better.

However, it still exhibits the marks of the Dreaded SIQ if I play with the notes too much. And "hide" does not do anything. I could be misusing it, I'm not much of a postit notes guy, prefer the mmb-to-a-textfile trick.

Could still be several things - Viewkit here at 21 and so is the os. Also I have 2 p's ? One would think everything in Irix would be careful about smp but you never know.

Anyhoo, here's a better binnery. Don't use the other one, she is bad. Do you want to tar yours and stick it up for comparison, duck ?

This is just the executable, the README and chestrc are still in the earlier attachment. No point to getting carried away until we find the problem

jimmer wrote: Hey there Earthlings ...

came a voice from the sky on that magical night ...

Thrilled to see somebody is looking into using my spit+ducttape Notes thingy. Will look into the various issues and see if/what to fix.

Heck, if that's all it takes, keep writing software and we'll take care of the rest

Meanwhile, I tried duck's with the same result, all is fine until I try < notes - hide >.

Then I looked at the source ... there doesn't appear to be any code for < -hide > ?

Seems like that'd do it

uunix wrote: Congtats looks like a nice hinv.
Type /usr/gfx/gfxinfo to display you graphics.

Can't get there from the prom, he doesn't have an os installed yet

You might be able to do a < serial all > from the prom, then cross-reference the part numbers. I can't remember if you had to be booted up to do that or not tho.

the fun part is yet to come, installing irix

uunix wrote: Does anyone know if this is compatible http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/111735464799?_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT with Octane? (Or any other SGI)

Yes. that one will work.

But it's missing half its handle.

They all work as long as you get the serial model. At some point they went strictly to usb, there's no driver for those but anything older than that should be fine. The real early ones also work fine and might be a little more "in the mood" for an Indigo ...

Not too many applications use the spaceball tho. It's too bad because they are ideal for 3d modelling.

uunix wrote: So the Tape drive has failed in the Indigo.

Mine experience with DATs hasn't been so wonderful either .. but they can still be fun.

I'm replacing with a Compaq SDT-7000.

No you're not, nanner nanner nanner Betcha fifty cents (izzat three shillings ?) that it's made by someone else, probably Sony (from the SDT prefix). There should be a label on the drive itself, maybe ? The Conner (later bought by Seagate) drives were CDT-xxxx, the Sony ones SDT-xxxx which is why I'm guessing Sony. Should be easier to find the jumper settings using the mfg name ?

btw, you might be lucky. The Sony SDT-9000 ? did audio DAT, the 10000 did not ? Mine is just on the wrong side of the division You can often write the SGI firmware to the generic drives, if it's the same model. Check into it, doing audio on your DAT drive is fun.

robespierre wrote: I still use Altsys Metamorphosis Pro occasionally. It can convert between DPS Type1 and TrueType so you can use it to load pretty much any font (except OpenType) into Irix. It also does previews without installing the font, and can be used as a shortcut to make an .eps from a font (without going through Illustrator).

Whoa, cool. Never heard of this one. The olde dayes was best

Meanwhile, back in the modern era, made some discoveries ...

So far, I'm very pleased with the results of ditching the three extra layers of crap that SGI dumped on us post-22. You could mark this down to 'self-fulfilling value judgements' except that I did a few pieces, gave them to the q/a department to check, and her response was "wow ! that's NICE !" And she's a picky ... umm ... person.

On the desktop not so much (altho things do seem snappier) but in printed materials, definitely. Also in desktop display of printed materials (e.g., pdf's), where you aren't getting the bitmap fonts that the locked-in xset fp path gives you. Does anyone know where the hardcoded path hides in irix ?

So my first conclusion was that the real Type1 fonts and DPS that come with pre-22 Irix are noticeably better.

My next conclusion, from diddling around with this, was that Adobe Helvetica is superior to Mickey Arial. And all the other substitutes, same. Side-by-side, the copies just don't cut it.

I wish our printer guys were still hanging out here ... my next conclusion, from looking at a bunch, is that Truetype fonts are not as nice as Type1. Maybe it's the people doing it, maybe it's the format itself, I dunno what, but in general, Type1 fonts look better.

Kinda makes me sad for all the wasted effort, I remember when OS/2 got Truetype drivers and everyone was all excited. It came with Type1. We went backwards, and we were happy about it

Maybe the fact that Adobe hired real type people to create their fonts while Mickey pays five guys, Raj 1 thru 4, $2 a day to make their stuff ... might have something to do with it. All the advertising in the world doesn't make Georgia into a quality typeface. I started out by thinking, "Okay, everyone has Verdana, it's wonderful, so let's convert it to Type1 and use it so all our Mickey customers can have a good experience." But now, sorry, we'll embed a real font into pdf's. Verdana isn't that great. Use your eyes instead of lapping up the boot-licking gush from Ziff-Davis. And Georgia really sucks in comparison to good type.

Also kind of sad but Loonix just doesn't have many font tools. I dragged Fontforge off shithub again, started to build it then threw the piece of garbage away. FUCK, this stuff is crap !!!!!!!! Can't they keep the kindergarteners busy with milk and cookies anymore ?

T1utils is still around, ghostscript has a few tools, and YAY ! there's a new package of tools called "lcdf typetools". This one has some useful stuff. Right now trying some OpenType-to-Type1 conversions. Wish us luck, cuz the Type1 fonts are getting hard to find.

The afm files for all the adobe fonts are available by ftp from their site, by the way. You just have to know the model number of the font, which can be kind of a challenge, but the stuff is still there at least. Yay.

And last but not least, not sure what to do about this but it really looks like the Base PostScript fonts are not the nicest ones in Adobe's drawer. There are several in the same style as Helvetica that have more character, Garamond is kick-ass over Times, New Century Schoolbook, eh, it's okay but ... The advantage of the base fonts is that they are in postscript printers, everyone has them, your work is going to look similar to everyone (but people get what they deserve, if they have the real thing it's going to look better than an Arial substitute) ... but there are nicer fonts in similar styles. Adobe didn't put their best stuff into the dtp world

It seems kind of odd that such a basic thing hasn't been a focus of attention, while Compiz and 3d file managers and all that other useless nonsense get so much press. But get your fonts really figured out and the quality of your output goes up noticeably.

sornywrx wrote: Started with Overlay CD 1 ...

Houston, I think we have a problem.

You didn't by any chance download these from SGI ? 'Cuz those aren't the operating system. Those are overlays to the operating system. Fixpacks. Updates. Will not do what you want.

robespierre wrote: I would be sincerely shocked if there was any after 1995. That's when almost all BBS's shut down for lack of interest.

Not exactly lack of interest, but BBSes were expensive ! Unless you had one right down the street, the phone bills were astronomical.

sornywrx wrote: That's correct, didn't even get to inst> prompt. Right before it should've loaded, after the CD is read and the tools are copied to the HD, it fails with that error message.

I've been here ... the more skillful members of nekochan will barf when they hear this but I've seldom been able to escape a truly bad install. No idea why but when they go bad for me, they go bad !

The easiest thing to do is hook the disk to an adaptec hba in any intel machine and low-level the entire disk from the adaptec bios. Have done this more than once with good success. For some reason (I don't make the same dumb mistake on the second try ?) it has fixed the problem several times.

Doing this in Irix does not work, it low-levels the entire disk except for the part that's screwed up. Unix is smart !

sornywrx wrote: I was using what was labeled as Overlay CD1.

This is a little worrisome but because they are homemade, we can't tell. The real SGI CD #1 is labelled "Installation Tools and Overlay 1" .... do the overlay CD's have a crippled installation setup on them ?

But you've got all the other CD's you should have, so seems like it's not just the overlays setup ...

That's why I asked if they came from the SGI download, cuz a lot of people think those are the full system. But they aren't.