[TruHobbyist]

Hey folks,

I just finished my new project, it is called love. It allows installation of IRIX from IRIX, LINUX or WINDOWS.

The reason for its existence is that IRIX installations are difficult, even for experienced users. New users almost always struggle with IRIX installations which can be demotivating and frustrating.

My goal is to make this task easy, fast and accessible.

You can follow any IRIX installation guide on the net with the love installer. The features are:

• designed specifically for network installation of IRIX
  
• it uses labels instead of cumbersome paths: love.6530.1 instead of /mnt/IRIX/6.5.30/Overlays_1_of_3/dist
  
• it is multiplatform (runs on IRIX, LINUX and WINDOWS)
  
• it consolidates all servers (bootpd, tftpd, rshd) into a single superserver
  
• is distributed as a single binary
  
• has an extremely small footprint (200KiB on LINUX, 400KiB on IRIX, 445KiB on WINDOWS)
  
• was extensively tested: IRIX 5.3, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5.7, 6.5.22, 6.5.30
  

When choosing "Install System Software" in the PROM, you would type:

Enter the name of the remote host: 192.168.178.100
Enter the remote directory: love.6530.1

love.6530.1 is a label that is associated with a real local path in the labels file: LABELS.UNIX.TXT or LABELS.WIN.TXT:

...
love.all.3264.6530.ov1 /mnt/IRIX/6.5.30/Overlays_1_of_3/dist love.6530.1
...

The first label is the fully qualified label name (FQLN), the second string is the real local path and starting at the third column come all the aliases which are normally shorter than the FQLN. During IRIX installation you can use either FQLN or aliases.

Thus, the above would be equivalent to:

Enter the name of the remote host: 192.168.178.100
Enter the remote directory: /mnt/IRIX/6.5.30/Overlays_1_of_3/dist

All paths in the labels file must be absolute pathnames. On UNIX this is straightforward because there is just one type of absolute path. On Windows, you can use:

1. C:\path\to\dist
2. \path\to\dist
3. \\server\share\path\to\dist

The second type is relative to the current drive.

If you need IRIX distribution files for the love installer, get them here.

To start love on UNIX, run as root:

Code:

# ./love your.IP.v4.address ./LABELS.UNIX.TXT

Or on WINDOWS, run as administrator or equivalent:

Code:

C:\>.\love.exe your.IP.v4.address .\LABELS.WIN.TXT

Note for WINDOWS users: you will need Npcap 1.72 to use the love installer.

Download a complete guide on how to install IRIX using LOVE from here.

Download the installer from here and spread the love!!!


EDIT 01.02.2023: Added link to love_guide.txt - a guide to install IRIX using LOVE

Tru

[Raion]

This sounds like a really useful utility and I'm going to have to try it out next time I am reloading from IRIX. This might be the holy grail of network installs.

When I finish setting up the new wiki, I will copy your documentation to it if you are okay with that.

[TruHobbyist]

Of course! You can do whatever you like with my post and the source code, it is free.

[flexion]

This is brilliant!!! As already mentioned, I tried it with success and I'm glad I can now finally use my ubuntu server as installation source without messing with configs!
I've been trying (and procrastinating) to configure rshd etc on that server for some time, but this is way better!
Love the label mapping file.. no more typos with long complicated relative TFTP paths!

Thank you!!

[Raion]

I've already read through the documentation and I think this is probably the holy grail for most people. I'll share it on reddit shortly. No more manual setup, no more VMs/vagrant, no more insanity.

[Linux-RISC]

I am the author of Reanimator and this implementation of the necessary protocols in a single source file is absolutely great.

I want to show my respect and admiration.

[Raion]

Yeah, it's definitely grand.

[TruHobbyist]

I am the author of Reanimator and this implementation of the necessary protocols in a single source file is absolutely great.

I want to show my respect and admiration.

Thank you, Linux-RISC. It's an honor coming from the creator of Reanimator. Maybe we should look into joining our efforts into a single easy-to-use installer. What do you think?

Would be great for the whole community.

[Linux-RISC]

Well, it might be interesting to release a "Reanimator in LOVE" version , replacing the Raspberry Pi OS services with LOVE and taking advantage of the downloadable IRIX images from the Reanimator server.

[Raion]

The main thing is that you should be using tarballs not EFS images or anything... there's really just no practical reason for using the disc images. So whatever you guys come up with, use the tarballs out there. ftp.irix.host is what we have for now.