11 May
2006
11 May
'06
6:46 a.m.
At 03:25 PM 5/11/06 +0100, you wrote:
lot
Don Y wrote:
that
I can't see any need (for *me*) for a second
NIC -- at least
not in *this* box. And, I can probably dangle an external
CD, disk, etc. off the internal SCSI (via the HD50 connector
on the back).
SGI machines do seem a bit funny about which CDROM drives they'll work with,
at least at OS installation time. I've seen several drives that work fine on
SGI 4D machines but not on Indys, and vice-versa. (it goes without saying you'll need a drive that'll do 512-byte blocks
rather than the PC world's
2048
bytes)
SOME of the SGIs and SOME of the SUN computers suffer from the same
problem. That is that they don't issue a command to the drive to set the
number of bytes per sector but they expect to get X (256 IIRC)
bytes/sector. IF the drive defaults to that then everything is fine. If it
doesn't then the installation aborts with a read error. AFIK this only
happens when you try to install the SW using the built-in ROM software. The
complete running OS doesn't have this problem. Note that later SUNS and
SGIs DO issue the proper command so you can use just about any drive with
them. But if you're using the earlier computers then you need to use a
drive that defaults to the correct number of bytes/sector. Some of the
drives (Toshiba IIRC) have an undocumented jumper on them that allows you
to change the default bytes/sector. Once you do, those drives will work
fine. This is a KNOWN problem in the SUN IPCs but the later IPXs corrected
this problem. Search the net and you'll find it documented with more
specifics in several places.
Joe
Is it safe to assume that the "built
in"
video is "good enough"?
Even the standard 8-bit video's pretty responsive. I don't think Indys were
ever aimed at *serious* video though; I think choices are limited unlike a of their bigger machines. They were more intended as
affordable workstations
that could act as visual front-ends to bigger and better SGI systems.
cheers
Jules