unsigned long geek = random(); » Silicon Graphics

Goodbye SGI, hello Suns

Michael-John Turner — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:18:01 +0000

On Saturday I got two Sun UltraSPARC systems from a friend, in exchange for my unused SGI O2. Although the O2 was a great little machine, I hadn’t used it for about a year and SGI’s poor support for IRIX (ie no easy way for me to get patches) meant it would probably have languished in my pile of unused systems for a while longer.

The two systems I got were an Ultra 10, 333Mhz, 256MiB, 9GiB IDE, Creator3D and an Ultra 2, 300Mhz, 256MiB, Creator3D and no disks. I’ve already stripped my Ultra 5 and put its RAM, SCSI controller, disk and USB 2.0 card into the Ultra 10 and it seems noticeably faster – probably a combination of the Creator3D and the extra cache on the 333Mhz CPU (2MiB vs the 256KiB on the Ultra 5’s 360Mhz).

The Ultra 10 is running NetBSD-current (4.99.1) and once Solaris 10 Update 3 has been released, I’ll be installing it on the Ultra 2.

Another one bites the dust?

Michael-John Turner — Mon, 08 May 2006 15:20:02 +0000

Spotted today that sgi have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It’s sad that the once great maker of high-end graphics workstations has been reduced to this, but I can’t help but feel the writing was on the wall once they diverted from their core competency with products like the Windows NT-based Visual Workstation series. The purchase and later sale of Cray also suggested that they didn’t know where their focus was.

This doesn’t have to be the end – perhaps it’s the end of the beginning and sgi will re-emerge a better and more focused company. Either way, I think it’s the end of IRIX – if sgi do survive, I think they’ll focus primarily in Linux-based systems, and abandon MIPS and IRIX to the history books.

This is a Unix system. I know this

Michael-John Turner — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:19:28 +0000

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, 2×4G 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 4×128M DIMMs to take the machine up to 640M). Unfortunately the RAM is rather pricey, even on eBay.

Some useful SGI links:

Nekochan – be sure to check out the forums
O2 information at Obsolete
FutureTech SGI Technical Advice and Data – very comprehensive

For those interested: hinv output.