20 Jun
2001
20 Jun
'01
7:31 a.m.
On Jun 20, 11:13, Zane H. Healy wrote:
On Jun 20, 12:12, James Rice wrote:
>I've acquired a SGI Indy system complete with
21" monitor, keyboard and
>mouse (no IndyCam) but the hard drive has been wiped. Does anyone know
>where I might get a copy of the IRIX media or what are the licensing
>terms. Does the hardware come with the right to the OS like NeXT?
>Looks like a cool system if I can get it up and running. Also are
>flopptical disks still available?
One or two suppliers stil sell the media. Getting a floptical drive is
rather harder. You might be lucky, though; someone I know picked one up
for a fiver a couple of years ago. However, I'd not recommend spending a
lot of money on one. They are rather sensitive, and in Indys, gather a
*lot* of dust, as the PSU fan sucks air through the floptical. I have a
beautiful example of "why you should keep disk heads clean" pinned to my
wall as a result. If it's just for transferring stuff to/from other
machines, you might find a Zip drive (has to be SCSI for an Indy) or the
network rather more useful.
SGI also supplied SCSI floppies (made by TEAC) in external cases, and other
makes work fine (I've used DEC ones several times).
BTW, Indys are not quite on-topic yet, under the 10-year rule :-) Not long
to go, though, as they were released in 1992/3.
Unfortunatly your best bet is probably eBay, unless
someone on the list
can
help you. If you want a recent version you'll pay
through the nose, and
even older versions aren't exactly cheap.
Actually, every IRIX system did come with a right to whatever version of
IRIX was supplied with it -- but not to free upgrades. So it's permissible
for a user to obtain and use a copy (including a CD-R copy). This was
discussed at some length on comp.sys.sgi last year, and the concensus was
that SGI ought to provide a reasonably-low-cost copy (as opposed to the
price of an upgrade). However, it seems few SGI sales offices adhere to
this, and the UK office (in my experience) certainly doesn't, even though
they can check to see when the machine was sold and therefore which versin
of IRIX would be appropriate.
James, if you mail me off-list with a note of the machine serial number,
I'll see if I can help out. To boot from CD-ROM, you'll need a CD-ROM
drive capable of delivering 512-byte blocks (not the 2048-byte blocks used
by PCs etc). Many modern ones will be fine, but older ones may not unless
they have a switch or jumpers to set this.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York