[Irinikus]

Over the past two days, I did something universally stupid and that was to download everything in the "current" and "beta" folders and attempt to install everything on my Tezro.

After about 20 hours of work, all that I ended up with was a mess! (so much so, that it was just simpler to reinstall IRIX than to try and uninstall the mess that was created)

It turns out that allot of the nekoware programs don't work, as they require dependencies that just aren't there.

So the question is: What's worth installing, that actually works?

I found quite a few little programs that work well, but I think we need to develop a list of things that work, to make it easier for others to get the best out of Nekoware!

[Raion]

Nekoware has a lot of packages in beta that are just plain broken.
Unfortunately that extends to some of current as well, and some dependencies just aren't satisfiable, and oftentimes they also pull in the kitchen sink.

The stuff that is worth it is mostly the smaller command line programs and libraries. The big programs are the buggy and shitty ones.

[Trippynet]

IMO, with Nekoware it is best to install what you need, rather than going nuts and trying to install everything.

Packages in "current" have been approved by at least 3 people, ie the original approach was to bung a new package into "beta", three people say "Works fine for me!", so they'd bump it over to "current". Now this hardly counts as exhaustive testing. Furthermore as the SGI community declined, it became difficult to get even 3 people to test out a new package and give it their thumbs up, which is why there's so much stuff in "beta" at the moment. Some of it will work fine, some will not.

Lastly, as you point out, some packages were linked against specific versions of older libraries that have in turn been superceded. You can sometimes work around this by symlinking a newer version of a library to match the older version that a package is requesting, or older versions of dependencies will be in the "obsolete" folder if you are desperate. Sometimes it may not matter, ie XMMS moans about being unable to find a specific version of libcurl, but it still launches and runs fine for me.

Of course, when these packages were originally built the version of the library in "current" was the one that the package wanted, so nobody picked up on the problem. In all honesty as these issues emerged over time, Nekoware should have had a system for demoting packages into an "unstable" folder or something so that the package was known to have problems and someone could try and re-build that package properly, but this didn't happen.

[Irinikus]

Here are some good things I've found so far:

Mandelbulber:




scummvm:





Starfighter:



ppracer:

[Irinikus]

I am slowly sorting through the nekoware folder and separating the programs from the supporting files: (This is what I have so far: )



Atlas works:



Celestia works well and is really cool:





XEPHEM works:



Q-CAD works:



XAOS works:



XV works:



Maelstrom works:



Crimson fields works:

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Icebreaker works:



Stella works, although I don't have any ROM files for it:



Toppler works:



xskat works:



Hexen II works:



nekoquake works:



ioQuake3 works:

[gijoe77]

I used to do the entire nekoware install on my older o2 and octanes - I used to just sit there for days going through everything one by one

[Irinikus]

I just found another cool little game: (SuperTuxKart)

[Irinikus]

I got GraphicsMagick to work by cheating, as it required liblzma.so.6 to work and this lib file isn't available in nekoware, so I made a copy of liblualib.so.5 (an arbitrary lib file) and renamed it to liblzma.so.6 and it now seems to work perfectly!









If anyone knows where I can get the actual liblzma.so.6 file I would really appreciate it, but GraphicsMagick seems to be working properly even though it doesn't have the actual file.

I've read that liblzma has to do with lossless data compression. I don't know where this would actually be needed by GraphicsMagick?

[jpstewart]

I got GraphicsMagick to work by cheating, as it required liblzma.so.6 to work and this lib file isn't available in nekoware, so I made a copy of liblualib.so.5 (an arbitrary lib file) and renamed it to liblzma.so.6 and it now seems to work perfectly!
[...]
I've read that liblzma has to do with lossless data compression. I don't know where this would actually be needed by GraphicsMagick?

The GraphicsMagick README says:

GraphicsMagick requires the liblzma library from XZ Utils available from

   http://www.tukaani.org/xz/

to support TIFF with LZMA compression and future LZMA-compression features (yet to be developed). The utilities from this package are also necessary in order to decompress GraphicsMagick packages distributed with ".xz" or ".lzma" extensions.

Personally, I don't think LZMA-compressed TIFFs are common.  The TIFF format supports several other compression methods (both lossless and lossy) which are, IME, more widely used.  So, as long as you don't try to read/write such TIFF files you'll be fine without the library.

That said, are you sure liblzma.so isn't in Nekoware?  I think it would be part of the neko_xz package, specifically in neko_xz.sw.lib (which may not be installed even if other parts of neko_xz are).  Also, you may need the neko_xz version from beta instead of current.

[Irinikus]

That said, are you sure liblzma.so isn't in Nekoware?  I think it would be part of the neko_xz package, specifically in neko_xz.sw.lib (which may not be installed even if other parts of neko_xz are).  Also, you may need the neko_xz version from beta instead of current.

Thanks for the help! I installed neko_xz-5.24.tardist and the correct liblzma.so was installed.

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ImageMagick also works: