For some reason, lately I've acquired an odd interest in old Unix systems.  I've already got a Sun Ultra 10 and ancient HP 9000 running an equally ancient version of HP-UX.  I had to have more, right?  So, I picked up an SGI O2 via eBay a few weeks ago, and just recently got my hands on the latest (last) version of IRIX, 6.5.30.

It's been named diatomic, for obvious reasons.  I still haven't been able to get sshd to listen on any of the IPv6 addresses on the system, but I'll get there eventually.  Quake2 works, at least :)

Tips

> Don't use GNU binutils on IRIX, it won't work.  You'll get various errors from as and ld when trying to compile anything with either the SGI Freeware or Nekoware gcc packages.  You need to install the compiler_dev packages from the Development Foundation that comes in the IRIX media kit.

> If you get the following message when trying to open a disc with inst(1M):

Inst> /CDROM/dist
ERROR: This software distribution is not meant to install on 
the version of IRIX currently running on this machine.  Sorry.

This means you're in the wrong directory.  Try opening /CDROM/dist/dist6.5 or something else.

> Xsgi runs in 8-bit mode by default.  Change it to 24-bit mode by following instructions here or just add "-class TrueColor -depth 24" to /var/X11/xdm/Xservers.

> You can enable the mouse wheel by following instructions here.

> IPv6 support on IRIX is disabled by default.  To enable it, run "systune ip6_enable 1" and reboot.  You may need some ipv6 packages, so watch the console when your system is booting up, it'll display a notification message.  Stateless autoconfiguration is enabled by default.

> If you hose up your boot sector and partitions, can't boot anything, and your O2 whines about not being able to find sash, run sash from the IRIX install CD (disc 1) by doing the following:

boot -f dksc(X,Y,8)sashARCS
boot -f dksc(X,Y,7)stand/fx.ARCS --x

Replace X and Y with your SCSI CDROM location.  More information here.  You can then repartition and relabel your disk, and then install IRIX (or whatever).

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