On Monday I finally acquired my first Silicon Graphics machine – an O2. It cost me only R500 (about $85) for a machine with a 150Mhz R10000 CPU, 128M RAM, 2x4G SCSI drives and a 2G tape drive. It also came with IRIX 6.3 and 6.5 media, which is great.

Unfortunately none of the open source operating systems support SGI machines well – NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have ports, but none have full hardware support or have stability problems. I’ll therefore be using IRIX for the moment (yay! /usr/etc/ifconfig here I come!).

Yesterday I bought a 10,000 rpm 18G Fujitsu SCA drive from Bridgeport to replace the internal 4G drive. I’m still looking for more RAM (preferably another 4x128M DIMMs to take the machine up to 640M). Unfortunately the RAM is rather pricey, even on eBay.

Some useful SGI links:

For those interested: hinv output.