NetBSD‘s Christopher Sekiya announced on New Year’s Eve that he committed the final bits for Indigo (IP20) support to
the NetBSD/sgimips Port.
Both NFS root and local root now boot multi-user. Please see his
message to the port-sgimips MailingList for details.
IP20 (Indigo) support for NetBSD/sgimips
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’ve been waiting to put NetBSD on my Indigo since I put it on my Indy and Challenge S. Good work you guys!
Brilliant work! Now all I have to do is find an Indigo on eBay (they’re so hard to find here in Europe).
Umm, why would I give up the rock stable Irix for NetBSD. I’m not trolling, I just don’t see what you’d gain.
You can run pkgsrc on Irix as well. I do and its awesome.
…to each his own….
This is great news!
I received an indigo free, the only problem, no root password and no password for any of the accounts, I know close to nothing about irix. After researching, I found out how to cat the shadow password file from prom. Then I let Jack the Ripper run through the accounts, somewhat lucky, I got two passwords, but not root’s. Jack ran for about a month, still nothing. Since I don’t know anyone else with a sgi box that could mount my system disk and edit the password files, I had to find another method. So, I downloaded the 6.5 overlays, un tarred them on my win2k computer. Found a bootp and tftp server for windows. Configured those. Booted my indigo across the network (10 mins??) got to a shell and changed my password.
Good so far…. until I found out why this unit was free. Changing the network configuration, and rebooting a few times, I started to get disk errors, and now X doesn’t load completely, strange.
Needless to say, now I can buy a new drive and learn another OS, until I buy/find those IRIX CDs.
I’m looking for a quiet SGI computer for my room, I only know of the indigo (not 2), which is kinda loud. How does the Indy, O2, or Octane compare?
Thanks.
They’re all quite loud and expensive to run. The Octane uses a 700+ watt PSU. The quietest would be the Indy with a Sony PSU, whose fan only spins when it get too hot.
The reason why you’d want to use NetBSD instead of IRIX is quite simple. Easier upgrades and patches. Most of us who will get an SGI don’t own a copy of IRIX, so NetBSD is a good alternative.
I received an indigo free,
grrrrrr
I’ve got an Indigo2 Teal which isn’t too loud, except when I put a noisy SCSI drive in it. Also, you can just change the fans (in the PSU and in the opposite corner of the box) if they’re too noisy. There’s no fan on the CPU (a 250 MHz R4400 in this case), and the airflow is very good.
As another poster said: The quietest, in its default setup, would be an Indy. Those are nice and small boxes, but they’re not as fast as the Indigo2. The Indigo2 is, BTW, very different from the original Indigo. I’m probably getting an O2 in a couple of days, so I’ll get to know how noisy those are too. 🙂
On both the Indy and the Indigo2 (and later MIPS-based SGIs) you’ll prefer Irix to Linux or NetBSD. It just supports the hardware much better. I don’t know about the Indigo, though. O2s, Octanes and others are almost unsupported by the free *nixes, AFAIK.
I own an Indy (R4400@200)and an Indigo (R4000@100).
The (my) Indy is extremely noisy, so I put the Indigo
in the “living” room. Well it’s a damn good audio recorder.