[orionbbs]

First off thank you so much for putting up this site, this forum and your FTP sites! 

I just purchased an SGI Indy 4600, one very similar to what I used to develop on when I worked at Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Labs back in the 90s (as an aside I'm out purchasing all the old computer systems I used to program on as a kid up through my career in software and networking. A Sun IPC and a Dec Alpha are next on my list, then an old VAX/VMS system if I can find it...) -- 

In any case, as a 'newbie' to this modern era of Irix and SGI, I figured it would be straight forward exercise to find current distributions of simple things like a web browser, SSH, OpenSSL etc... apparently not so straight forward! 

I literally spent all night last night til the wee hours of the morning researching this only to find 1) 20 broken links to the site freeware.sgi.com (seems after HPE purchase they purged all SGI content?), 2) This thing called Nekoware, which also sadly seems to have disappeared --- finally just now I typed in the right words into google and stumbled across this site! Hallelujah! Again thank goodness (and maybe we can work on some SEO for the site to save others the pain?

Now to my question; how do I use Nekoware? I read on several other sites dating to 2008 about its use as an RPM like tool, but for the life of me I can't actually find the 'tool' itself; only the archive binaries that use it....  sorry for the newbie question I'm sure others know how to find this but I'm at a loss and I really want to get Firefox 3 running so I don't get anymore stupid SSL errors and renderings of HTML5 that make me buggy eyed lol...

thank you again

shaun

[dexter1]

Hi Shaun,

Welcome to our forum. Congratz on your SGI Indy R4600. Do post a hinv when you're able.

First you should make sure the Indy is running IRIX 6.5.22m to run modern software like Nekoware and Irisware. An Indy with less than 96 megabyte of memory will not smoothly run IRIX 6.5, then 5.3 or 6.2 is an option. And for that there is https://jupiterrise.com/tgcware/tgcware.irix.html

Nekoware use to be all mips4, which means only processors of R5000 and up are capable of running the software. We're still working on Irisware to make this a bootstrappable collection of build tools and programs (correct me Raion if i misinterpret something)

There is some older mips3 Nekoware in our ftp section which runs on your R4600 and i am building new mips3/mips4 Nekoware with more modern tools.

The basic gist of using these tardist packages is that you untar them and run 'swpkg' or 'inst' on its content as root. More recent versions of these tools can automatically unpack tardists, so you don't have to.
The tardist contain software and manual pages subsets and dependencies which have to be met in order for the software to install. This used to be quite tedious, where you have to go down the dependency list to find all the packages and open them or install them first.
These days you can download and open them all simultaneously, so the dependency list should be minimal or non-existent.

Make sure to read other SGI sites, like Ian's http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html
And don't hesitate to ask something if it's not clear.

[orionbbs]

Thank u sir! Very helpful...

Performance for sure w/ 6.5.22 leaves much to be desired; I recall them being much faster but I'm sure I was running 5.x back in the day.

On my to-do list of upgrades 1) memory (64mb only today, I'll max to 256) 2) Video, still has the 8bit graphics -- I've been having trouble finding a reasonably priced 24bit card, guess I'll have to wait a while and ebay that item.

Heres the system details:

CPU: MIPS R4600 Processor Chip Revision: 2.0
FPU: MIPS R4600 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 2.0
1 133 MHZ IP22 Processor
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Data cache size: 16 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: Indy 8-bit
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral ISDN: Basic Rate Interface unit 0, revision 1.0
Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 4.1.0
Vino video: unit 0, revision 0, IndyCam not connected

shaun

[Raion]

Your R4600 is the main bottleneck there. However you need a certain PROM to upgrade to R5000.

Just an FYI, but you can currently only run MIPS III.

[orionbbs]

10-4

Finally got back to populating my system with software (after just upgrading RAM to 192mb).

Question: Is there a mirror for the old SGI freeware files that seem to have disappeared (been removed) post HP acquisition? I've found several dead links to apps I'd really like to install w/o having to compile on my own; e.g. VNC. (http://freeware.sgi.com/)

thanks

shaun

[commodorejohn]

Archive.org actually has freeware.sgi.com saved, and IIRC most of the downloads work. Probably be a good thing to get up on the irix.cc FTP...

[orionbbs]

@Commodorejohn thanks! totally didn't think to use wayback, unfortunately although it looks like the HTML itself was stored, none of the FTP downloads were archived (at least not the few I just tried) :(

[commodorejohn]

Silly question, but are you clicking the linked name of the item, or the "Download" icon off in the righthand column? It's kind of an odd '90s site design and only the icon actually links to the download proper.