The collected works of llama

Hi guys,

I've wanted an SGI machine for years, pretty much any would do, but being based in New Zealand they don't crop up very often and shipping from overseas would be a killer, so I'd pretty much given up on the whole thing when suddenly I've inherited three of them! A friend who works at a post production studio said they were getting rid of some old SGI hosts that had been sitting in storage for years so I grabbed the lot site unseen.

I now have two O2s, one a 300MHz R5000 with 384MB RAM and the other a 180MHz with 128MB RAM. The faster one also comes with an SW1600 and an extra NIC. I also got an Octane though as I don't have a 13w3 adapter yet I can't actually fire it up and see what it's loaded with. They also had an Onyx2 sitting there but apparently someone else had claimed it (which is probably for the best as I doubt I'd fire it up very often, maybe only on a cold winter day )

I'm pretty stoked that both O2s boot and even the clock batteries held charge as the date was correct! I'm now just playing around in Irix while I decide what to do with them (I wrangle Linux servers for a day job so I"m certainly comfortable working in the shell, though old school Unix does trip me up sometimes with some of the differences).

Anyway, just a quick hello and expect a bunch of questions from me moving forward as I try to get things working on them!

Cheers,
Andrew

Thanks for the welcome guys!

Took a bit to get networking up and running as I'd like but all sorted now. I think the first order of business will be to get nekoware up and running so I can get some software installed (as fun as it is to surf the internet like it's 1998 in Netscape a browser that actually knows what css/javascript is would be good!). I'm also still trying to work out which shell to use - I always used bash traditionally (as that was what most Linux distros and OS X use) but I've had to add a bunch of things to my .profile to get things like ctrl-c working as I'd expect them too (break the current running command). Is there a way to get csh to source ~/.profile or am I better off switching shells? Also need some basic things like a music player, video player etc as I can't really *do* much with it in its current state.

Otherwise it's kinda fun messing about on the o2 - that SW1600 is actually a really nice screen considering the age of it! nice and crisp, though it's been a while since I used a system that didn't have anti-aliased fonts. All adds to the old school charm

Ideally I"d like to do a fresh install as there is a lot of cruft and the hard drive is only 2GB (I've got a 9GB drive too which would give me a bit more room) but it didn't come with any media unfortunately so that's the next thing to track down. Failing that would I be able to do something like dd the 2GB install on to the 9GB drive? Is there anything else needed to get it to boot off it?

Cheers,
Andrew

hamei wrote: Maybe I can save you a little time and effort .... with an O2-300 don't even bother to try Fireflop 3. Flop 2 was usable but v ... e ... r ... y s ... l ... o ... w. As in, watch it draw the page in stripes. See the pixels change as the page gets drawn ! Plus 2 is just as bad for browsing now as Netcrap 3, many pages display as a stripe down the middle of the window. Ain't the innernet fun ?

I speak from experience on this subject, had an O2-350 at home for a couple years.

You might try Dillo.

Yeah I've read about the performance of browsing on the o2 - still, I'll take a slow site that renders over one that doesn't load at all. It's more for playing around with anyway at this stage - hopefully once I get the Octane fired up it will be a little better (but I'm still not holding my breath there...)

For music, I've used mxaudio for years and am very happy with it.

Cool, I'll check it out.

This stuff is bleeding over into the rest of the world ... for ages I couldn't figure out why gunzip on the Sun wouldn't work. Finally took a look at the "executable" and discovered it was a fricking bash wrapper script. OpenCSW, bunch of total idiots. Solaris != Linux. Nitwits

True, took me aaaages to work out why a comparison wasn't working in a script on Solaris (got tricked by a bash'ism).

foetz wrote: indeed, nobody needs bash. if you want it fancy use zsh and if you want it solid use tcsh. that btw does not only apply to irix but any unix.

I'm certainly not married to bash, I guess I just need to set up tcsh (or similar) properly so I have the things I'm now used to (up arrow history, tab completion with choices, ctrl-c break, etc etc). Is there a list of shells available on the system (eg an /etc/shells equivalent)? I seem to have a limited selection but I'm only eyeballing the bin directory so maybe they're stashed somewhere else?

that might get difficult. for music xmms is a great thing but video is tricky. at least assuming you wanna play videos using "modern" codecs such as xvid or x264.

Yeah I'm not likely to be watching anything too serious on the o2, that's what I have a TV for Playing music would be a great start.

late irix versions did come with anti aliased fonts and so do gtk2 based programs

Oh true, I didn't realise that. I'm pretty out of date, this machine is running 6.5.14f so a bit behind the curve. I'm not super keen to mess with it too much while I have no install media until I've got a copy of the disk somewhere safe

search ftw:
viewtopic.php?p=35760#p35760

That's perfect thanks! I'll give it a go when I get home tonight.

Thanks guys for all suggestions!

Looks like zsh could be the go for an interactive shell - I've been using it on my Mac and I really like it.

I've also potentially tracked down some install software (I say potentially as I don't know if it is a proper install or just the overlays) from the same guy who gave me the boxes - no idea what version but I'm guessing relatively late as it came with a Tezro that another post production house bought a while ago. Apparently they have a box of SGI stuff I can have a sort through so I've got my fingers crossed. I'm trying to convince them that they no longer need the Tezro and should pass it along to me

In other news I've downloaded the 6.5.22 update from SGI so will upgrade the o2 when I get a chance, then start playing with nekoware.

And I finally got a monitor adaptor for the Octane so can finally boot the thing - turns out it's a dual 250MHz with 512MB RAM. It also contains an install of Flame by the looks of things, though I haven't had a good look for any other software.

It's running 6.5.23. One strange thing is there is no desktop as such (No dumpster, icons on desktop etc), all I have is the menu bar top left so I open a shell and load apps from there but there is no menu item for things like Netscape etc. Will have to dig around a bit, but happy to have it working!