[Raion]

http://irixce.org/download.html

Download it here, report any issues with the patches below. Still working this out, as we've seen. Let me know though.

[Raion]

Full release Info:

Shells
TCSH > Can be directly upgraded to latest tcsh with no issues, and no additional dependencies

Lang
Perl > Upgrade to latest Perl without issues
TCL > Upgrade to latest without issues

Libraries
zlib > 2002 version can be upgraded to latest without issues
openssl > Latest can be installed, but it breaks sgi_apache/webforce (I don't think that anyone uses those anyways?)

Archiving
tar > Add jpstewart's script/C lang to autoexec various utils
XZ, BZIP2 added

Headers
libxg added for many new things including getopt-long

Desktop Apps
Nedit Upgraded

[Raion]

I've incorrect chown'd the tar.real binary, so please update to 755. As patchset 2 is near, this is very unlikely to be allowed to fester. I will go over the IDB files thoroughly.

[bamdad]

hi,

i've installed this yesterday, and i'm seeing one weird bug since then: SoftwareManager asks for a root password then exits without bringing up swmgr. this is quite weird because LicenceManager has no issues like this.

now i've done some other things on the system beside this, so i'm not even sure the IRIXCE patches are the root cause, but i really can't find anything else that might be wrong.

i've made a video demonstrating what happens: https://youtu.be/ZAPrMUozIOc

help? : )

best,
bamdad

[Raion]

Yeah, that's not a bug we caused I'm relatively certain, we don't touch any binaries that they do. But you may have to check the permissions of some binaries, as this patchset had some that were bad (Check /sbin/tar (should be 755 and bin:sys) ) and others.

[bamdad]

sorry for accusing you then. : )

weird issue nonetheless. one question: when rebooting after installing your patches, the kernel was automatically rebuilt. after going through the output of par SoftwareManager i only see that the child process (in this case swmgr with elevated privileges) exited and then the main process did too.

this might be a long shot, but did you tweak any kernel parameters related to privilege management?

[Raion]

No, I didn't tweak any kernel/chkconfig parameters. As I said, the only possible thing here that changed was that we updated the /sbin/tar binary to use a wrapper -- and that may have been shipped with incorrect permissions due to an oversight on my part (my root umask was wrong) when I built the tardist.

[bamdad]

okay, i'll try to look elsewhere for the problem. and what i didn't mention: thanks for creating this in the first place. it's really heartwarming to see some patches created for IRIX after all these years and if you need any testing/support (even monetary to a limited extent), count me in..

[Raion]

I could use a tester and someone to bounce ideas off. Once I return to this and release the next iteration I will let you know.

[Raion]

Just an update guys I haven't been completely idle with this. Even though I have failed to maintain dependencies, I have been doing research into the operating system itself and figuring out parts that I can improve upon and assist with the security problems.

Security is the first major priority of this project, but eventually new drivers and other things will be incorporated. Certainly I plan to incorporate file looper among other bits once that is released. The eventual goal is once we have enough patches set up I might actually just start releasing new releases of irix through various channels that have the updates pre-applied so that people can just do clean installations.

There will always be a place for historical installations do not get me wrong but I want to eventually make it so that somebody running a web server here can do so without freaking out. Almost all of the major vulnerabilities that relate to the operating system are user space libraries and utilities that can either be updated or replaced or removed.

I want to emphasize a significant amount of this has been a learning experience for me where I'm kind of just learning by the seat of my pants. I'm sure some people take sadistic pleasure in my failures when I mess up but I am not here to entertain people; I am doing these projects for myself and myself alone and I'm sharing them with the rest of you because I feel like they truly are bringing new and important advancements to the operating system.

Thank you for being patient and hopefully later this year I should be able to get back to a more regular release schedule for this and fix existing bugs.