SGI has their complete publications library online – Owner’s Manuals, Man Pages, Release Notes, the lot.
The URL is http://techpubs.sgi.com.
Their Technical Publications are also available as downloadable PDFs.
books, IRIX, silicon graphics
There is a range of different operating systems available for various machines produced by SGI. The main SGI Operating System home page can be found here.
IRIX is SGI’s SVR4 based Unix.
The IRIX hompage can be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/irix/index.html
Windows NT – SGI’s Visual Workstation range were Intel-based workstations running NT 4. Although there was a port of NT to MIPS, none of the MIPS powered SGI machines will run NT.
The SGI NT home page used to be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/nt/index.html. Check out http://www.webarchive.org to see if there are any archived pages left.
Linux – SGI’s most recent range of servers are powered by Intel processors and run Linux. SGI has been quite active in the Linux community, extending existing parts of Linux, and making available SGI developed enhancements.
The SGI Linux home page can be found at http://www.sgi.com/developers/technology/linux/index.html
Linux on SGI – the Linux on SGI home pages cover an SGI port of Linux to run on the Visual Workstations, as well as a MIPS port to run on the SGI Indy.
The Linux on SGI home page can be found at http://www.linux.sgi.com
NetBSD – there is a port of NetBSD to some of SGI’s MIPS based boxen.
If you’d like to see what SGI has been up to in the Open Source community, SGI has a page up within Developer Central.
bsd, IRIX, linux, silicon graphics
XFS is SGI’s scaleable, high performance extent-based filesystem. CXFS is an evolution of XFS that allows multiple clients to access the same filesystem at the same time on your SAN.
As systems scale and data volumes grow, access to, and manipulation of that data becomes a serious bottleneck.
I’ve found that many people are unaware of CXFS, or it’s benefits, and in general there’s a fair amount of confusion over the difference between concurrent access to a SAN filesystem versus shared cluster filesystems, as provided by something like Clustered VxFS.
So, I’ve collected together some documents and information which will give a good grounding on CXFS, and hopefully help show what an impressive feat it is.
DMF – Data Migration Facility – is a valuable tool that can live off the back of CXFS. You might be familiar with the concepts of HSM – Hierarchical Storage Management. DMF is pretty much the same thing.
cxfs, IRIX, silicon graphics, xfs
I highly recommend not only checking out http://freeware.sgi.com but also pages on the Other Sites page for other software.
Download: fsn.tar.Z
Not one I’ve written myself, but this is the ELF binary of the famous FSN, which featured in Jurassic Park. You can find out more by reading this post.
All the other applications on this page have been compiled using GCC under IRIX 6.5 on my Octane
Download: clone_root_disk.ksh
The XLV/XVM plexing option is expensive – very expensive. Yet everyone needs a backup of their root disk. This korn script can be run nightly from cron, and will clone your root disk. All you need is another disk in the machine, which has already been partitioned by fx, and away you go!
The script is pretty straightforward, so can easily be modified to clone other important disks in your machine.
Version: Quake2 3.20
Download: SGI Quake local mirror
Dug out from an old backup tape, here’s my mirror of the SGI Quake pages from SGI’s website. Quake, Quake2, plus some entertaining mods like Action Quake 2.
Version: 4.1.9 (unstable branch)
Download: allegro-4.1.9.tardist
Allegro is a cross-platform gaming library – similar to SDL. Off the top of my head, you’ll need ESD installed to get sound. There’s an ESD tardist on the SGI Freeware website.
The Allegro homepage can be found at http://sunsite.dk/allegro
Version: 1.0
Download: elite-tnk.tardist
Elite is the greatest computer game known to man. Ever. Elite:TNK is the result of a project by Christian Pinder to reverse-engineer Elite from the original BBC disk version.
This requires Allegro, and runs splendidly on my Octane. It installs in /usr/local/elite-tnk, and the binary (newkind) must be run from within there.
The Elite:TNK home page used to be found at http://www.cjpinder.clara.net/elite.html, but this site now appears to be dead.
Version: 1.2.1
Download: actx-1.2.1.tardist.gz
ActX is a collection of anime window sitters (Active X Window System).
The home page can be found at http://kurumi.sakura.ne.jp/~chimari
Version: 0.31
Download: akaneclock-0.31.tardist
AkaneClock is an excellent anime clock. Lots more fun to have sitting on your desktop than the normal clock.
The home page can be found at http://kurumi.sakura.ne.jp/%7Echimari/ActX
Version: 0.4.2
Download: aterm-0.4.2.tardist
aterm is my preferred terminal. It allows background transparency, and with the Buffy GTK theme fits right in with the Indigo Magic desktop.
The home page can be found at http://aterm.sourceforge.net/
Version: 0.9.24
Download: prngd-0.9.24.tardist
PRNGD is the Pseudo Random Number Generator Daemon – a source of entropy. You’ll need a decent source of entropy for any cryptographic applications – OpenSSL, for example. PRGND saves any entropy it has when it’s shutdown – this means you have a strong source of entropy right from when your machine boots. It also doesn’t generate a ‘pool’ of entropy, so, unlike EGD, it can’t be drained and won’t block.
The home page can be found at http://www.aet.tu-cottbus.de/personen/jaenicke/postfix_tls/prngd.html
Version: 1.0.6
Download: gnupg-1.0.6.tardist
GNU Privacy Guard is an OpenPGP compliant Open Source replacement for PGP. Personally, I’ve used PGP 2.6.3i for donkeys years, but more and more software appears to be written to use GnuPG specifically – hence this tardist. This version isn’t the most recent, but works fine for me. I may build a newer tardist sometime if there is enough demand.
The home page can be found at http://www.gnupg.org/
Version: 1.1.4
Download: zlib-1.1.4.tardist
zlib is a compression library. Pretty much anything that will use compression will need this. This version fixes some potential security flaws with previous versions. Note that any applications statically compiled against older versions will need to be re-compiled against this new version to use the fixes.
The home page can be found at http://www.gzip.org/zlib/
Ah, the trusty Challenge S.
bash-2.04$ uname -a
IRIX thumper 6.2 03131015 IP22
bash-2.04$ hinv
1 133 MHZ IP22 Processor
FPU: MIPS R4600 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 2.0
CPU: MIPS R4600 Processor Chip Revision: 2.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 16 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Integral ISDN: Basic Rate Interface unit 0, revision 1.0
Integral Ethernet: ec3, version 1
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI controller 5: Version WD33C95A, differential, revision 0
Integral SCSI controller 4: Version WD33C95A, differential, revision 0
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
CDROM: unit 6 on SCSI controller 0
Tape drive: unit 5 on SCSI controller 0: unknown
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
bash-2.04$ uptime
12:03am up 1075 days, 3:06, 1 user
Challenge S, IRIX, uptime
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October 3, 2008 
