The collected works of josehill - Page 3

scar wrote: how do i resolve those? do i need to buy certain cd's with 6.5.22 bases? please be as specific as you can for me. thanks so much.

Sounds like you need to get the IRIX 6.5 Foundation 1 and Foundation 2 discs, and possibly the NFS disc and perhaps an Application disc. The Foundation discs are probably enough, but the answer really depends on what is actually already installed.

SAQ - you may be right, but I seem to remember running into problems with that approach somewhere along the way. It's possible that my memory is hazy, but I'm not sure.

I'm wondering if it's an issue of what's already installed. My old shop's "default" installation included a fair number of non-default selections and perhaps also deselections, so I'm wondering if maybe k *, i s / i u, etc. behaves in more complex ways in such cases.

I have an idea...

scar wrote: ok, then, how can i tell everyone what is already installed so i can get that answer? thanks.

...though it would probably just be simpler to get your hands on a full set of IRIX cds, as it would be a lot of work to try to comb through the list of software and figure out exactly where the problem lies.

porter wrote: Is that the Phil Collins version?

It was only a matter of time before someone asked...

I had an Indy drive do that. If I remember correctly, it was performing thermal recalibration. Not much that you can do about it.

If you have a commercially licensed version of Xinet Appletalk, I think 6.5.22 installs a newer version than 6.5.8, and the new version won't work with the previous license. Also, Acrobat and Display PostScript disappear, but are replaced with xpdf and ghostscript. IIRC, the major changes in the Print subsystem don't come until around 6.5.28 or so, but you might want to read the 6.5.22 release notes first.

I've been planning to write a wiki page about all of this -- hoping to do so in a couple of weeks.

Yes. Thermal recalibration is a drive-level operation. Newer drives don't do it as much as some of the older (late 90s) ones.

Doh!!!! I forgot to mention the biggest issue of all (patch 5086)!

The other advice is spot-on, as well.

It's good to know that recondas has my back! Thanks, Dave!

recondas wrote: Other than the specific issues Jose just mentioned, if you're going to do a live upgrade sure to install patch 5086.

bjames wrote: Can anyone tell me if the risks are low?

Human error is probably the biggest risk factor. You can minimize your exposure by having a fresh back up and or cloning the drive before you start.

nice job on the pidgin icon...

Yep, first try Dexter's nvram resetenv advice, as it is very quick and easy to do, and it will either work or not, no harm done if it doesn't. After doing that, run hinv in the prom, and make sure that the boot variables match the actual hardware in the machine, i.e. that the disk IDs match the location of the boot disk listed in nvram.

If resetting the nvram environment variables doesn't work, then double check the disk partitioning and volume header information. For example, you'll want to have sgilabel and the appropriate version of sash in the volume header.

If they are missing, you can load them from a boot cd using dvhtool. If all else fails, follow strandedinnz's advice to "zero out" the disk by repartitioning, adding sash to the volume header, and then creating a new filesystem on the disk. See http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/6.5inst.html or search for info at http://techpubs.sgi.com .

It is odd, since as far as I can tell, most, if not all, of the IRIX issues listed were resolved a few years ago.

I still use a 12" 1.5 GHz G4 with 1.25 Gb RAM running Tiger as my everyday machine, even though I have a 2.33 GHz 15" MacBook Pro and other, newer machines hanging around.

The 12" form factor is great, particularly if you travel a lot, and the performance is fine for most tasks. At the moment, I have 14 Firefox tabs open, iTunes playing some music, the BBEdit text editor running, and a Photoshop Elements 3 window open, and it is running just fine. I also use Office 2004, Safari, Opera, and a few other apps routinely.

It's a tough little machine, having survived a few hard falls with no consequences besides a few major dents.

The only serious negative about the machine (aside from the fact that it is a little more than four years old) is that it does tend to run hot, and, as a result, the fan runs often -- and loudly. Running things like Flash widgets or Adobe AIR apps (e.g. TweetDeck) seem to kick up the fan activity quite a bit. I am noticing that Flash-intensive web pages are less snappy than I'd like, but they're not too bad yet.

One final point - given the age of the machine, you may need to buy a new battery (appx $120) if you plan on running it untethered. If you can, ask the seller for the number of battery charge cycles and/or the charge capacity. (You can get the info from the "Power" section using the System Profiler program or by running a utility like coconutBattery ). Once a battery gets much beyond 150 cycles, it can lose its ability to hold much of a charge. A new battery for this model will have around 4400 mAh. Anything above 3000 mAh or so will still be fairly useful. Much less than that, and the battery will last less than an hour.

R-ten-K wrote: I always advice against making any significant investment on a product that has been EOL'd. That been said, if the price is cheap... go for it.

I agree with R-ten-K on this. If $300 or so is your budget, I think the G4 is a reasonable value, though his point about the performance advantage of a hackintosh laptop or an entry level MacBook is definitely worth considering. Also factor in the price of a new battery for the G4, if needed, and the value proposition relative to an x86 machine decreases quickly.

For example, if the battery for my G4 PowerBook died tomorrow, it would absolutely be worth it for me to spend $120 on a new battery. However, if both died or were somehow lost, and the replacement price for the G4 PowerBook and a good battery were around $500, I'd rather save up and spend the extra money on an x86 MacBook (new or used).

I figure I'll keep using my G4 PowerBook as my workhorse through next Spring or early Summer, and then I'll probably replace it with one of the new unibody 13" MacBook Pros. I was playing with one at the Apple Store a few days ago. A pretty slick machine, it's actually slightly lighter in weight than the 12" G4, although I prefer the G4 display's aspect ratio over the MBP's wider screen.

According to a developer at Adobe I came across, the biggest issue with Flash isn't video compression/decompression. As R-ten-K indicates, the G4 is more than capable of handling that, particularly if the Altivec unit is recruited. Believe it or not, Adobe has done a lot of optimization on the basic Flash rendering engine, and, particularly as of version 10, the raw video capability is noticeably faster and leaner than earlier versions, even on PowerPC.

According to this developer, the major issue stems from the addition of special features that paying customers have been asking for, like comment and annotation layers (e.g. those annoying YouTube bits), which ramp up RAM and CPU requirements for each video. Embed a few such vids on a single page, and you start running into trouble pretty quickly. Throw in a bunch of wacky Web 2.0 widgets and javascripts, and even a fast machine can struggle.

strandedinnz wrote: If I then boot the Macintosh I can;t double click the self extracting System7.5.3 image

Is the file still in .bin format or is it already in .smi format? If the former, search for the IRIX version of mcvert to convert it to something more useful. There should be a version at the old SGI Freeware site.

porter wrote: I would expect them to be MacBinary SMI (Self Mountable Images). You need somebody with a Mac to write them all to floppies, then get raw copies of the floppies.

Right - they are MacBinary (.bin) encoded Self Mountable Images. Once they are on the SCSI drive on the SGI, McVert should be able to convert them to native SMIs, which should then be launchable on the Mac once the drive is reattached to the Mac.

The first file contains the SMI executable and a piece of the mountable image, and all the other files are the remaining parts of the mountable image.

As long as the original poster is using a bootable floppy with System 7.0.1 or higher, he shouldn't need to write them to floppies first.

Nice! I've always been a fan of OpenBSD.

While I don't plan to put anything besides IRIX on my SGI MIPS machines, I like to see the hardware getting attention from other projects. If I had an Origin 200 (and a little more time), maybe I'd try it, just for fun.

By the way, I have a 200 MHz Pentium Pro box that's been serving as an OpenBSD-based router between my two home office internet connections for about a decade.

sybrfreq wrote:

ajerimez wrote: 7 is generally slower than XP, especially in OpenGL, so hopefully it offers some compelling new features to justify its existence.

I haven't noticed this.

I suspect that machine spec has a big impact, with the amount of RAM and the choice of video card being the largest variables. In particular, I suspect that there is a bigger difference in relative performance between XP and 7 on machines with only 1 GB of RAM than there is on identical machines with 2+ GB of RAM. For that matter, I bet that there is a significant difference in Win7 performance on machines with 2 GB vs 4 GB.

I do have an old machine that is pretty much at the minimum spec for Win7. It runs XP SP3 very nicely. If I have the time, perhaps I'll try installing Win7 on it for comparison, but I'm inclined to keep it on XP.

I'm looking at Win7 upgrades this way: for machines already running XP, I'm inclined to keep them on XP, but for machines running Vista, it's a no-brainer to move to Win7.

The one thing that might make me move from XP to Win7 on my home machine is some of the under-the-hood security enhancements on Win7, though I haven't examined the issue closely yet. I haven't really talked about this yet, but I've been running an XP machine at home without live antivirus/malware protection, and the performance improvement has been astonishing. Win7's implementation of a "Least-privilege User Account" seems more sophisticated than XP "standard" user, so that might be worth the upgrade.

As an aside, I'm sure that under most circumstances, the performance difference between a machine running antivirus software and one not running antivirus software is much greater than the difference between XP and Win7. Note: I am not suggesting that you go without antivirus protection on a laptop that you use in a public place. I'd only risk it if the machine is on a pretty secure network, and it is certain that the machine will not be used to visit shady websites.

milatchi wrote: Microsoft seems to be regressing in the GUI and usability dept. They're making it shinier and more convoluted, not sleeker and easier to use.

Starting with the Start Menu! One of the things that I really dislike about Win7 is the inability to revert to "classic" appearances. Even on Vista you could turn off most of the crap and get a reasonably Win2k-like experience, even if it took a lot of work to do so.

sybrfreq wrote: maybe if you want a win2k-like experience, you should be using win2k For better or worse, microsoft has made something different. Nobody says you must change, if you want to continue using ms-dos 6.22 then go right ahead...

As I said, I already have Win7 installed in a few places, and, overall, I think it's a big improvement over Vista. That doesn't mean that I can't criticize the parts of it that I don't like.

voidfoo wrote: I am curious about what you guys dislike about the vista start menu? I am more a keyboard guy so I type words in the search box most of the time. I found this is much faster to get shortcuts and run them than the old clicking way

That's probably the best way to use it -- I'll have to try to do that on Win7, now that the classic view has been removed entirely.

To me, the "new" Start Menu feels very cluttered and visually distracting. Even under XP, I switched back to the classic Start Menu. I also like to disable things like "Personalized Menus," etc., since I want frequently accessed menus to be predictable, rather than dynamic.

hamei wrote: We were all set for emergencies, it had a helicopter landing pad on the hood

Not enough options. Better to get a flight-capable automobile! http://www.terrafugia.com/

MisterDNA wrote: 27MPG all the way back, though the V6 wasn't liking the climb out of Death Valley.

27 MPG In a Camaro? Even on flat roads without traffic, that's pretty amazing! Maybe the wind was at your back, and the bedframe was acting as a sail!

PymbleSoftware wrote: When did the old MacOS emulation die out was it this release or earlier.. ?

Tiger was the last release to support the Classic environment on PowerPC machines. FWIW, Classic runs very nicely on my PowerBook under MacOS 10.4.11. I like to fire up the old Bungie Marathon games (forerunners of today's Halo series) under Classic every now and then, and there are a handful of utilities on Classic that I still like to use.

Indeed, maintaining access to Classic is the only reason I never updated that PowerBook to MacOS 10.5 (Leopard).

As an aside, I've been tinkering with mini vMac , SheepShaver , and Basilisk II in order to run older versions of MacOS on modern hardware. It's fun to see how fast System 6 runs on 1.5 GHz cpu!

shadowless wrote: Have been putting off the upgrade for a while now. For those who did the upgrade, are there any performance benefits after the upgrade?

Any software compatibility issues for those software that you are using?

Hope someone can share your experience. Is it time for the snowing leopard?

I've been quite happy with Snow Leopard on a MacBook Pro. Like Pymble, I wish that I had done some proper benchmarks to verify that the improvements were physical, rather than psychological, but I did think think that the system felt a little snappier after the upgrade.

I haven't run into any problems, aside from needing to reinstall a third party scanner driver and needing to upgrade my copies of Parallels and VMware. Also, the first reboot after the upgrade took a surprisingly long time, but that was a one-time occurrence.

Before upgrading, you should take a glance at Macintouch's Snow Leopard Compatibility Guide and its Reader Reports Page to see if anything important to you has glitches under Snow Leopard.

foetz wrote: the gfx performance is worse than 10.5, filesystem perf. also and i have problems with the color profiles. don't like the new default gamma etc. at all. also booting takes much longer although the 10.6 disk is much faster than the 10.5 disk

What hardware are you running on? Booting is now quite fast on my MBP.

It is true that the new PC-style default gamma takes some getting used to. I haven't bothered to reset it to match the more traditional Mac gamma.