unsigned long geek = random();

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.

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.

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:

• 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.