Iris, my SGI Indigo workstation

News 12/09/99 An architect will sell his SGI Iris for the symbolic price of 5.000 Belgian Francs (125 Euros) The SGI Iris Indigo is a wonderfull machine, used in the beginning of the nineties for creating special effects in movies like "Terminator 2" and "Jurassic Park" See: Indigo for and in Jurassic Parc Note that the videocard is as big as the motherboard and has some nifty features, surpassed in the PC-world only many years later with the advent of the Voodoo cards. 14/09/99 Just before paying, I ask the architect to startup the system. But it doesn't boot any further than "Can't set tod clock" A quick Internet search reveals it must be due to an empty battery (indeed the sytem wasn't powered on for months...) The battery could be soldered on the mainboard and SGI's solution is a full mainboard replacement, costing way more than a full PC :( Therefore the architect reduces the price to 2.500 Belgian Francs (62 Euros) ;-) Original price with all the software and stuff would have been 3.000.000 Belgian Francs (75.000 Euros) according to him. 15/09/99 The battery isn't soldered to the mainboard, so I Order a Tadiran Lithium TL-5186 battery 3.6V at Cotubex (505 Belgian Francs) 05/10/99 I have the battery and an active SCSI terminator. Iris is now working, I can login as normal user, but the given root password is wrong :( I'm gonna have to hack it ;-) 06/10/99 I could reset the root password with the IRIX installation CD. Internet access is now working. Installed Netscape 3.04 Gold. Screenshot 24/11/00 After an electricity crash, Iris can't boot anymore. She complains about the hard disk. 24/03/01 Iris is finally repaired! It took sooo long because she had to compete for my time with real girls ;-) Installing IRIX on an unformatted hard disk is not that evident. The SGI admin FAQ and This Old SGI helped a lot, but were incomplete or not specific for the Indigo. So, here is the procedure that worked for me: Find SCSI Hard Disk Find IRIX 5.3 CD (latest supported for Iris Indigo) boot -f dksc(0,4,8)sashIP12 sash: dksc(0,4,7)/stand/fx.IP12 /usr/etc/route add default your_gate 1 You can add this command to the last line in the network script under /etc/rc2.d or in /etc/init.d/network.local Create /etc/resolv.conf as: hostresorder local bind nameserver yournameserver1 nameserver yournameserver2 30/03/01 Again city-wide electricity failure. Iris survived it this time! 01/04/01 Installed Netscape 4.08 26/05/01 Iris is still a wonderfull machine, but maybe it's starting to show its age (base model is from 1992!). The users start to ask for a more recent browser. The most recent browser available is Netscape 4.08. Compiling a browser such as Mozilla, doesn't seem worth the huge effort. Slow cpu but fast hi-res graphics? Sounds perfect to make an X-terminal from it. But, because I didn't want to loose the feel of the SGI IRIX OS and apps, I decided to make an X-workstation from it. That's the combination of a workstation and an X-terminal. That way users can choose if they login (visually!) into Iris self or into another network host. The setup was not straight forward to find, so here is the procedure: In /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers comment out the following line: :0 secure /usr/bin/X11/X -bs -nobitscale ... In /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xaccess make sure you have something to configure the Chooser, e.g. the line: * CHOOSER BROADCAST or if you want to limit to, or emphasize certain hosts: %hostlist host-a host-b * CHOOSER %hostlist Put in some boot script, e.g. /etc/rc3d/S99X : X -indirect iris where iris is the DNS name of your SGI X-terminal. Note that the often advised 'X -indirect localhost' doesn't seem to work. If necessary, configure other machines for exporting X-sessions. Next time you reboot, you will be presented the Chooser with a list of network hosts, with the SGI included. Links Iris Indigo Unofficial SGI Indigo Guild