As two of my O2 machines only have a 4 GB disk drive, I decided to replace these disks with larger ones. On E-Bay I found 36 GB Fujitsu disks for 20 Euros each. They came in good shape and are newer (build date: 2005) than the original ones (build date: 1998).
As I did not want to install and configure IRIX from scratch again, I looked for a way to clone the root disk onto the new disk.
(read more)Installation of IRIX can be done in different ways.
Install IRIX6.5.22 using virtual CDROM drives describes my prefered way using BlueSCSI and virtual CDROM drives.
I recently sorted my collection of SGI related CD's.
Found IRIX CD's ranging from 6.5.2 to 6.5.16. These are available from jrra.zone as ISO or tar files, so there was no need to convert them to ISO files.
The first O2 of my collection is updated and connected to a NFS server.
I used an O2, where I was able to login as root and an old Suse Linux laptop acting as NFS server.
A good introduction on how to setup a Suse system as NFS server can be found in document Sharing file systems with NFS.
(read more)There are different SCSI computer storage emulation platforms available to replace real SCSI disks or CDROM drives.
The following 2 emulators are Open-Source hardware.
I choose to evaluate the BlueSCSI emulator, because it is cheaper (~ 60 Euro) and it is available with a Centronics-SCSI connector. It can be purchased from several small companies either as a kit or a fully assembled product. My order of the fully assembled BlueSCSI from One Geek Army was delivered in good condition and worked just out of the box.
(read more)Over the years I collected several SGI workstations. Currently I have an Indigo2 (magenta), an Indigo2 (green), an Indy as well as 5 O2 machines.
One of my first actions was to clean the machines from dust and check, which of the machines are still working.
With the exceptions of the Indy and one O2 all machines are still working.
(read more)I am a recently retired software engineer working since 1986 in the domains of 3D computer graphics and simulation.
I worked on nearly all Motorola and MIPS based SGI systems starting with an IRIS 3030 running the Robert Abel software, intensively using Performer on O2 and Onyx systems in the 90's for training simulations and slowly declining SGI usage and replacing it with OpenSceneGraph and NVidia GPU's around 2008.
During that time I collected several SGI workstations to keep them
away from the 
.
On the other hand I have been using Tcl/Tk for nearly 30 years for professional and private usage and am still engaged in the development of several Tcl/Tk extensions.
My goal for this year is to get most of my SGI machines up and running as well as porting the current Tcl/Tk version and extensions to IRIX 6.5.