The collected works of josehill - Page 8

robespierre wrote: When it rains, it pours. John McCarthy died today .

I was wondering why my Siri was crying.

On the assumption that you mean general productivity applications, I'd go with Photoshop 3 and Illustrator 5 for graphics, NEdit for text, and assuming a fast enough machine, OpenOffice for office stuff.

Juda$ wrote: The CD's are the backup copies supplied with the machine I believe its 6.5.22 judging by the installed version on 1 of the disks. it is entirely possible that its just overlays that have been applied at a later date though to be honest.

Even if it is just an overlay set, the installation tools cd should be able to boot and load the installer.

When you say "backup copies," does that mean that they are CDs that someone burned, as opposed to actual CDs from SGI? If the former, it is very possible that they weren't burned correctly. Among other things that can go wrong, the filesystem on the boot CD must be in SGI EFS format, and the CD header must be correctly created (there is a thread on that somewhere on Nekochan).

Can you read the CDs on a PC? If so, they are probably in ISO format, not EFS. That's not the end of the world, however. You may be able to perform a net install, using your CDs in conjunction with the DINA virtual machine .

Of course, it could also be that the installation CD is damaged, and you need to get your hands on another.

PS. Yes, you were waiting long enough. It really should only take a couple of minutes at most in the step you mentioned.

I haven't seen that particular set of CDs before. If the list of CDs is accurate, it looks like someone mixed and matched CDs. I doubt that it is really "new in box," unless it was a special order. It looks like a partial 6.5.3 Overlay set (missing the Applications CD), an O2 LCD patch CD, and the patches for an O2 running the older IRIX 6.3.

It has an Installation Tools CD, which is enough to boot into the installer on many machines, but since it lacks the Foundation 1 and 2 CDs, it is not enough to perform a clean installation.

One other note: your Octane has a 400 MHz R12000 cpu. Since the R12ks weren't shipping when IRIX 6.5 first started shipping, early versions of the IRIX 6.5 installer won't work. I think you'll need at least IRIX 6.5.8, but I might be wrong.

I recommend getting your hands on an IRIX 6.5 Foundation 1 CD, an IRIX 6.5 Foundation 2 CD, and an IRIX Overlay set in the high teens or higher. IRIX 6.5.21 or 6.5.22 seem to be where many people land. You can also download the 6.5.22 Overlays from SGI. Also, again, consider running a net install using DINA.

Juda$ wrote: an someone with a little more experience than me tell me if the link below contains all the software I need to perform and install ? It does contain the installation tools and overlayswhich I believe are the important parts for booting the system but I would not mind a 2nd opinion.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SGI-SOFTWARE- ... 3a6d1112b1

Sean4000 wrote: lol. What exactly is that?

In SGI world, a shoehorn is a single-slot XIO-to-PCI adapter, while a shoebox (aka PCI cage or card cage) is an XIO-to-PCI adapter that supports multiple PCI cards. They were available for Octanes and Origin 2xs. For example, see http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/SGI_Octane

zafunk wrote: Works as advertized, Jose! Very handy bit of info. Thanks!!

Excellent! Happy to hear that!

Nice work! Might be worth figuring a place to put this into the wiki section on IRIX installation, if it's not already there.

Best wishes to you, too, foetz, and to all nekochanners as well!

ShadeOfBlue wrote: It works even if you don't have MIPSpro (use /var/sysgen/root/usr/bin/cc) or with other compilers on other OS's (tested with gcc, icc and clang).

Nice! I just ran it an old Mac OS X machine I have kicking around.

PymbleSoftware wrote: I don't have nroff installed on this machine, no time to fire up the main beasts, and I don't know where SGI nroff comes from

SGI nroff is found in the Documenter's Workbench (DWB) product. Although IRIX overlays contain updates for it, the base DWB product was not actually included with IRIX, but was licensed as a separate product. See this thread for (slightly) more info: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=12765

My relationship with watches is very similar to my relationship with SGI machines. I used to rely on them, and I still admire them and appreciate the engineering that was needed to design and to build them, but I find that I use them less and less. These days, when I need to determine the time, I usually use my cell phone, look at the wall, look at the display on my car, etc.

The only time I wear watches these days is when I go hiking where cell phones aren't practical or when I am dressed for a formal occasion. Somehow, wearing a tuxedo or a fancy suit without wearing a watch feels like walking around with an open zipper. Sort of.

Yeah, I'm an odd duck.

I was poking around SGI's Techpubs site today, looking for an IRIX 5.3-era man page, and I noticed that versions of IRIX prior to IRIX 6.5 are no longer listed in the Techpubs navigation links. However, SGI still has the pre-6.5 documents available through Techpubs as "archive" material. For your convenience, here are the links to the version-specific sections of the Techpubs archives:

IRIX 5.3 - http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ?coll=0530
IRIX 6.2 - http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ?coll=0620
IRIX 6.3 - http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ?coll=0630
IRIX 6.4 - http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi ... ?coll=0640

For those who might be interested in creating their own, personal archives, there was a fair amount of discussion on the subject in this thread from a couple of years ago - viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10071

I've been using TenFourFox for a while on my old 12" G4 PowerBook, and the last couple of releases have been extremely impressive performance-wise. A really great project!

hamei wrote: Whoa ! Gotta love it ! Altho i tend more to turning Javascript off rather than making it faster (it's nothing but a rattlesnake hiding under your bed) the rest of the project looks dang good ...

http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/

and OS 9, too ...

http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

In my experience, this issue is usually caused by either permissions problems or misconfigured DNS settings.

tingo wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Are there separate chkconfig settings for each account?

I don't think so. If you read again what he wrote: "...get root privileges..."
to me, that implies that chkconfig is only used by the root user.
I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

Correct - chkconfig settings are system-wide. They are used to determine which system scripts are run when an IRIX system starts up and shuts down. Each chkconfig setting corresponds to a script in the /etc/init.d directory.

Best wishes, Harry! Please do stop by from time time to time. We'll be sure to keep a cold six pack in the refrigerator!

ajw99uk wrote: It would be good to have a better idea of exactly what adding a user does behind the GUI dialogue boxes. The manual explains some of it, but not to the level I need to sort out the current problem. Pointers to which files I should be checking for permissions problems would be welcome. I'd have hoped that System Manager could set things right when adding a user but perhaps there is a "default profile" with (on my system) wrong permissions, which get carried across to the new home directory? However, there is very little in the new home directory, so perhaps the "default profile" (assuming there is one) has gone completely AWOL!

Have you taken a look at the man pages for sysmgr , UserManager , and addUserAccount ? Those are the programs that actually run when you add new users through the System Managers, and their configuration files (listed in the man pages) control what is placed in a user's default "profile."

One tip, particularly since you are using a machine that was set up by someone else: there are many places where a system administrator might choose to customize a user's environment, and some of these may conflict with or override settings that are made by System Manager. For example, when a user starts a tcsh shell, as many as six tcsh configuration files might be read, but only two of those are initially written by System Manager's account creation process. For example, see viewtopic.php?p=56903#p56903

ajw99uk wrote: Not sure I follow why DNS would be an issue - local user on local system, and network access as root seems fine. Can one add users before setting up the network? (i.e. while the system is still "IRIS" and using the default standalone IP address)

I probably should have said "hostname" instead of DNS, but it's the same basic issue. The IRIX GUI keeps track of certain kinds of objects, including Desktop icons, using hostname information (or, in some cases, NIS or DNS information). In the dim ages of history, the idea was, in part, to make it easier to share objects, like CD-ROM drives, over a network. If the system is misconfigured, the Desktop gui might not be able to find everything and draw icons for things like CD-ROM drives, even if the CD-ROM drives are accessible via the command-line interface. I haven't thought about this stuff in a while, so I'm hazy on the details, but it used to be a reasonably common annoyance in older versions of IRIX, like 5.3. It's less of a problem of in IRIX 6.5. The key items in older IRIXs were things with names like Cadmin, objectserver, directoryserver, etc., but IIRC, only bits and pieces of them survive in IRIX 6.5. For 6.5, the key things to look up are the fm and fam programs.

Titox wrote: Maybe the System Manager doesn't creates the necessary files in the user directory. I have always created the users from EZSetup. EZSetup checks the integrity of files.

While EZsetup offers to configure a couple of Desktop settings that are not included in the standard set of System Manager prompts (e.g. cursor focus, Toolchest orientation), EZsetup and System Manager both use the same underlying commands and defaults to create new users. Indeed, one of the first things that many system admins do with new IRIX systems is to disable the EZsetup account and then either use the System Manager or automated methods to set up new user accounts. It is extremely unlikely that the choice of EZsetup vs System Manager is the source of the problem.

ajw99uk wrote: But, like you, I had understood there is only one set of chkconfig entries determining what services are running for all users, as confirmed by other responses here. Given the range of things governed by chkconfig, a one-per-machine approach makes much more sense than a one-per-user - it's rather more fundamental than your browser favourites or choice of background or screensaver!

Yes. General system-wide setup/configuration files tend to be found in the /etc directory (like the chkconfig and " run level " files), while user level customizations tend to be found in individual user directories.

ajw99uk wrote:

tingo wrote: I might be wrong, I'm only a newbie when it comes to IRIX.

Me too! but enjoying the learning process, with help from the forum.

Glad to hear that you are enjoying the process. Keep the questions coming!

recondas wrote:

ajw99uk wrote: Indigo2, IRIX 6.5.22m, only a root account ( how it came to me

As you might be in the process of discovering, sometimes it's less headache to just save any licenses and clean install previously admin'd systems.

Indeed. To the original poster, if you have the media available to perform a clean system installation, it might be much easier to backup your system (especially any license files for special software like compilers, added features, and third party tools), erase the drive by creating a new filesystem, and start from scratch.