I’ve heard they’re old/not fast, too proprietary, too expensive, relics, and about a thousand other “gifts of wisdom from the one truth” of others. *r12000 400mhz 2mb cache, 1 gig ram, v6 odysey video *r4400 200mhz 1mb cache, 256mb ram, 24-bit 1280×1024 video…not bad condiddering PCs were windows 3.1 486s in the era the indy was new! It’s the best source for hobbiest sgi and IRIX users. I have an Octane2* running IRIX 6.5.22, from ebay, comming in the mail soon. Unfortunatly I messed up IRIX (rm’ed some system files by mistake), and ended up putting debian on the indy and selling it. I tried out IRIX 6.2 last year on an indy* (a 10 year old machine!) and found lots of cool 3d toys in addition to simple and effective package management and expected unix stability. The design of the machines is more beautiful and functional then anything apple has put out. The hardware (if you can afford anything made less then 5 years ago) is top of the line. IRIX was the only user-friendly *nix before modern linux and OSX. I think everyone who has played with sgi hardware and IRIX develops a liking for it. ![]() It would also be nice to see SGI bring the costs of their workstations down to something approaching reasonable – not ultra-cheap, but an Itanium or even an Opteron workstation, uses OpenBoot for the Firmware and costs around NZ$4K-NZ$5K. You’d have the benefits of having a large, specialised software development community, SUN has already ported their compilers and Solaris to Itanium already (Solaris got into beta testing via an Early Acccess programme back in the heady days of Itaniums development – it was promoted as the “SPARC/POWERPC Killer”). Regarding Itanium and Solaris with OpenSolaris (if it does actually occur), it would be an interesting turn of events if SGI embraced OpenSolaris, ported it to Itanium, and bought their IndigoMagic desktop over to Solaris. Trying to modify IRIX and bring it up to speed will be a waste of time when there’s already Solaris, FreeBSD or Linux freely available. IRIX is the past for SGI, they don’t care about it anymore, it’s too old of an OS now anyway. Trust me, the US Army pays them well to modify Linux for them and they have enough money to pay their bills. You simply don’t hear much from them anymore because they moved to a different market: US Army technologies. Because the Red Hat script fails to build a RAM disk, the SCSI driver will not be available either.SGI has money, it doesn’t need to be bought or rescued. On most SGI systems, including the 1200, 1400, and 1450 servers, a SCSI driver is needed to boot the system because the root disk is a SCSI disk. Because the drivers do not exist in the Red Hat kernel, the script used to build the RAM disk will fail. During the upgrade process, the Red Hat installer will try to put these drivers into the RAM disk image that is used to bootstrap the machine. These drivers came from the Qlogic corporation and have not yet been included in the Red Hat distribution. In earlier ProPack releases, SGI provided updated drivers for the Qlogic 1040, 1280, and 2100 cards. If you fail to do the following, your machine will not boot after the upgrade. ![]() Warning: Do not attempt to upgrade to Red Hat 6.2 before following these instructions.
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