SGI Crimson (was:13W3-3BNC cable) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

5 Jan 2008

On Jan 5, 2008 10:46 AM, Scott Quinn <compoobah at valleyimplants.com> wrote:

...
  Servers (S) didn't come with graphics. Later SGI
separated out their
 server lines even more with a different base name (Challenge/Origin),
 but during the late '80s the base model was the same. 
So since mine says "Server" yet has a 13W3 gfx board (haven't opened
it up to ID it yet, and can't get into the OS to do a gfxinfo) it was
probably a field-upgrade?  I do have the "Elan" badge as well, and the
owner only had one Crimson, so I'm assuming that's where it came from.

...
  You can, but SGI never wrote a good OpenGL
implementation for the
 PowerVision VGX/VGXTgraphics hardware, so much of the work is done by
 the main CPU (IRIS GL is fully supported). So, it depends on what you
 want to do with it... 
"Pimp my SGI," I guess, and just make use of the nicer gfx board
before the dead Iris gets scrapped.

...
  One possible gotcha- IRIX 6.2 fx for the Crimson is
broken, so you'll
 need to fx with either an earlier IRIX (4.0.5-5.3) or fx on a different
 SGI. 
I got an internal cdrom recogzined last night.  The only Irix distro I
have now is 6.5.  Will the Crimson at least load fx from that?  It was
acting like it couldn't even find the file, though, giving some scsi
errors if I booted into the hdd's fx and tried 'ls dksc(....)" on the
CD.  I tried an Apple CD600i and a Toshiba model which was listed in
the SGI cdrom survey.  Of course, they could be bad drives, who knows.
  Too many variables!

Next method will be to attach the boot drive to another SGI and edit
/etc/passwd from there.

Thanks for all the helps

--
j