The collected works of toasty

Hey everyone,

This is an unusual request, but could someone with a 1920x1200 monitor take a screenshots (prefer PNG) of their IRIX Twilight background for me? One with empty desktop and one with toolchest and any icons grouped in the center. I would like to make a wallpaper out of it for my Mac. I have an Indy which only goes up to 1280x1024 and I tried stitching several shots into one big one with little success

I appreciate any help!

Wow, thanks jimmer! It looks great

My first O2! It was on ebay "for parts/repair” because the seller couldn't test it and I decided to take a gamble on it. Turns out it just needed a SOG capable monitor

hinv:


/usr/gfx/gfxinfo:


It’s just missing the blue skin, top cover, second hard drive sled, and cdrom kit. Luckily, I have a scsi cdrom drive laying around so I used that to install IRIX. All I have to do now is find those parts and make this system complete.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I can attest that mopar5150 doesn't bite.

I just PM'd him

I'm still new to SGI's and I have question: are there any significant revisions to the O2's back (front?) plane? I did some research on my machine and it seems to be from 1999. If I get a chassis from 1996 (or a later one from 2001), I can stick my system module in it and it would still work, right?

Gotcha, thanks for the info!

Many thanks to mopar5150 for the case and AV module. This O2 battlestation is now fully operational . I've updated the hinv in my original post and here's a picture.

vishnu wrote: What happened to your spacebar?

It was a dumpster find, haha. Only PS/2 keyboard I have at the moment. A granite SGI board and mouse is next on the list though!

Just for fun, I compiled xphoon, a simple program that sets the X root window to a picture of the current phase of the moon. And I'm using it as a background on IRIX (a la Twilight). I've attached the binary. Simply untar it to your path add the following to your $HOME/.backgrounds file.



Source: http://acme.com/software/xphoon/

Enjoy!

I decided to try OpenBSD on my Indy and I followed this step from the instructions:

The kernel image loaded by default is specified in the ``OSLoadFilename'' variable, which defaults to ``unix''. To boot OpenBSD, set it to ``bsd''.

It booted fine and I played around with the OS for a couple hours before wanting to put IRIX back

But now I noticed that when I run 'resetenv' in the PROM command monitor**, OSLoadFilename defaults to /bsd instead of /unix. I tried 'unsetenv' and 'setenv -p' with no luck. It really isn't an issue as I can always manually set it to /unix whenever I want the default values back. But it just doesn't feel right, if you know what I mean.

Any ideas on how to get the PROM back to its normal self?

** I run resetenv whenever I reinstall IRIX, just so everything's back to factory default.

setenv -p saves settings across reboots and that works fine. It's just if I want to reset everything with resetenv, the default kernel is /bsd instead of /unix. I probably made it permanent (somehow) when I was messing around with OpenBSD. I think I'm just gonna get a new Dallas chip and see how that works out.

Hey, I was a n00b too when I got my first SGI (an Indy) earlier this year. And I'm still learning a lot. Just keep practicing at it . I made a quick graphical guide and this was the way I got on the internet with my SGI machines. I hope this helps.

http://cru.sdf.org/irix-internet/index.html

And this is someone else's guide for doing it all in the command line. Best of both worlds!

http://software.majix.org/irix/network-setup.shtml

Congrats on getting it working. Try turning off some unneeded services with these commands and reboot:



Make a backup of the .netscape folder and restart the browser with a fresh configuration. Be sure to turn off Java & Javascript. Your Indy will thank you . But keep in mind it's an outdated browser and most sites won't load properly.

Ian Mapleson's site has one listed as "PROM image file for use with an R7000C/600MHz O2." Here's a link: http://sgidepot.co.uk/depot/7000c_600.mcs

Hope that's the one!

Transmission, a popular bittorrent client for OS X and other *nix, has a component called "transmission-cli" which is just a simple command line client. Supports magnet links and UDP. It might be a nice replacement for neko_ctorrent, and since the efforts for libtorrent + rtorrent on IRIX seems to be dead end.

Can anyone with dev kung fu try to see if "transmission-cli" can be ported to IRIX?

I briefly had an Octane and from what I remember, the PSU fan is 120x120x38mm and only had 2 pins (Cherokee model). Not sure about the top fan, but I think it's 92x92x25mm and also 2 pins.

I use my O2 for music, light photo processing, irc, learning UNIX & shell scripting, and as a simple media server[1] when I’m not sitting in front of it. It’s a nice little machine that could still do more after it had been EOL’d.

[1] I store movies in a folder and share that via OutBox. Then I can stream to my MacBook by opening the url of a movie file in VLC. Crude but works!

Came across this on flickr and I counted 14 1600SW monitors And it looks like there's a Fuel under the desk, too. Although I don't think that's what's driving all those displays. Or is that possible? Just thought I'd share this.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/desync/6362001701/

Here's my workflow for converting a video to an MPEG-1 stream that's playable with the native IRIX media player. I used a Mac with latest ffmpeg and mjpegtools. I'm by no means an expert, this was just a result of many late nights trying several incantations in ffmpeg

1. Extract the sound:


2. Extract the video:


3. Combine audio and video streams:


Notes:
a. IRIX loves 4:3 video. If you have a 16:9 video, replace step 2 with this to make it 4:3 letterboxed:


b. If you get an error from mplex, increase the bitrate (1411 in the example step 3 above) to cover for any overhead.

c. My examples are for creating 320x240 MPEG-1. Adjust accordingly if you want 640x480.

I can't speak for an Octane with EMXI, but on a lowly O2 with CRM graphics, I've found MPEG-4 part 2 video with AAC audio plays nicely on mplayer.

300 MHz R5K O2
Full screen video: 320x240 at 300 kbps and audio at 64 kbps.
Widescreen video: 320x180 at 300 kbps and audio at 64 kbps.
CPU usage is at around 40-55%

400 MHz R12K O2
Full screen video: 480x360 at 800 kbps and audio at 128 kbps.
Widescreen video: 480x270 at 800 kbps and audio at 128 kbps.
CPU usage is at around 50%
* 640x480 (full) and 640x360 (wide) resolutions are also playable but CPU usage goes up to 90-95%

So if these are passable on an O2, then a faster system with better graphics will obviously have no problem. I think the key is to use the old MPEG-4 part 2 codec when converting videos for playback on an SGI with mplayer. And keep the resolution to the strict 320/480/640 widths. IRIX seems to love those for video. Can anyone with a VPro Fuel or Octane let me know if 1280x720 MPEG-4 (1200 kbps) is playable on theirs?

It looks like sgi has finally retired the freeware site as it just redirects to the corporate front page now. I FTP'd to ftp.sgi.com to see if the old stuff is still there and it is. But who knows for how long. Hopefully someone with the resources mirrors the FTP site if it hasn't been done already.

Krokodil wrote: Rats, I never actually got around to going there.

Good news, a mirror of the freeware site exists in the nekochan ftp. It's in /pub/sites/freeware.sgi.com

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I'm curious to find out more information related to ritchan's original question:

ritchan wrote: how fast of an UltraSPARC do I need to get average sized H.264 rips going?

I'm thinking about getting a Sun Blade 2500 to tinker with and get into the Sun/SPARC/Solaris world. I see some single 1.6 GHz US IIIi with XVR-600 + 4 GB RAM configs on ebay that are within my price range. I mainly edit photos, work with office documents, listen to music, and browse the web. All seem to be capable with Solaris so I'm thinking of using a SB 2500 as a daily driver.

But for some fun and diversion, I would also like to watch videos. How does the SPARC build of OpenCSW mplayer perform? Would the config I mentioned above be able to play 1280x720 HD? How about regular 640 or 720 width videos?

And how about web browsing? Are the latest SPARC builds of Firefox and flash player usable on the SB 2500?

I've been running Solaris 10 u8 in a VM on my Macbook to learn and get used to it. So far so good. But granted, I'm testing on a modern Intel Mac. Would appreciate hearing any real world "modern computing" experiences with an actual SPARC machine. Thanks!

armanox wrote: Okay, so the "can it run?" See if the attached answers your question. Quick testing shows mine can play youtube at 360 and 480 (frames are dropping for me at 480p) using flash player, and HTML5 player seems to not work. The video power also reflects on the GPU, which mine's not designed for this kind of usage. I do not have any video players installed to test out local video formats for you.

Definitely helps with giving me an idea what web browsing would be like. And I can live with 360p youtube videos. Thanks for taking the time to test!

Mine are named after Game of Thrones characters.

I dabbled with linux on my Power Mac G5 when I still had it. And it also did the Apple version of fastfan! I think it's because the G5's fan control system under linux hasn't been perfected yet. It was much quieter when I threw FreeBSD on it though. Congrats on your "new" G5!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but if you want to get console output/access from the O2 you have to plug the null modem cable to the serial 1 port. Not serial 2.

Giving this a bump because I bought one of these adapters (version 1) from kubatyszko a few months ago. And I was finally able to use them for the first time last night when I replaced my Fuel's dead motherboard. I went with the safe choice and got an ATX version of the Sparkle PSU (FSP460-60PFN). Installation was easy and I'm pleased to say my Fuel has been running for several hours now without any problems. Many thanks to kuba for his work on those adapters! I highly recommend it.

My env output. Voltages all seem to be within normal limits:

Looks pretty cool. But if you want to watch youtube vids natively on IRIX, there is a way! Get neko_youtube_dl from beta (neko_python required) and run as root to update the script to the latest version. Then just download a video and play it with neko_mplayer.

With VPro graphics, run to download a 640x360 mp4 video. Make sure to use the vo=gl option in mplayer otherwise it will be scrambled.

On slower systems (even on an O2), use to download a 320x180 video.

You can also use the updated youtube-dl script to download music from soundcloud onto your SGI.

This might be common knowledge for some of you already but thought I'd share.

I just recently learned about single board computers that are on a PCI card. Forgive me if you all have known this...I’m a youngin’! My understanding is that you use them on a passive backplane to cram a bunch of computers in a small case.

Some models have an ATX power connector and since I’ve got an ATX PSU in my Fuel, it got me thinking: can I put one in it? I’ve been going through manuals and data sheets and they don’t really go into detail about power. So I don’t know if they usually draw power from the PCI connection or just ATX. But I see voltage requirements for 12V, 5V, and 5VSB.

Anyone have experience with these things? Would you advise trying to use one in an SGI? It would make a nice solution to what necron2600 is looking for.

Example:
Advantech PCI-7032
http://www.advantech.com/products/1-2jkn7b/pci-7032/mod_2b0c1cae-2197-4d35-937e-4e7e4aa80ed7

I've always used Ian Mapleson's parts and spares page as a reference: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/partsspares.html

SGI part numbers should look something like "030-1467-001 Rev H" and are almost always found on every board, module, etc.