[Raion]

If you're reading this you probably have come from Reddit or other places I've asked people to spread this message, or you clicked on this.

Currently the hobbyist community for IRIX is in a rather decayed state. We have lost a great deal of porting and development effort over the past decade.

I am willing to help solve this by donating some free hardware to experienced Linux or UNIX developers who have the following skills:

• Excellent programming experience in C or C++
  
• Previous experience coding on a UNIX or Unix-like platform
  
• A commitment to the hobby of collecting, maintaining and preserving SGI hardware
  
• and who do not currently own a single SGI.
  

This offer comes with a lot of stipulations:

• You must send me via PM a brief resume of your past experience, your areas of expertise, your location, and a promise that you will not:
  
• Resell the hardware I give you
  
• If you can no longer develop, maintain the hardware or fulfill your obligations to the  community, you will give the hardware back to me or oneof my moderators if I'm unavailable or they're closer. I do not want to see any hardware I give out donated to a thrift store, destroyed or sold for a profit.
  

• That you will commit to doing some level of work for the SGI community that is substantial.
  

[patolin_01]

Hello! I get your reply on reddit, but I cant send PMs here, because of my new account.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Patricio, and Im Electronic Engineer, and got a Master Degree in Software Engineering. I have been working with linux for arround 10 years, and coding using open source tools almost the same time.

I can code on C/C++, PHP, Python and Haskell.

As I told you, I would love to help in this project, but I live in Ecuador, and shipping a full workstation will cost a lot of money.

[Raion]

I sent you a PM and removed you from newly registered so you can communicate with me privately.

[matyas]

Hello,

I'd love to have a shot at porting SuperCollider (<URL url="https://supercollider.github.io">https://supercollider.github.io) to Irix, and maybe have a go at bringing back some great Unix audio apps (PD, CSound) that formerly ran on Irix but apparently no longer do.

My development resume isn't as extensive as some people's, but I do have some experience, am looking to get more, and I've been using various flavors of Unix since 2000.

Let me know what you think!

[kbra]

^- FWIW I'd be interested in such a project as well - I was planning to run older versions of some of the "academic" audio software but might also be a nice project to see if the newer versions are portable with sensible effort.

(This is a bit offtopic in that I don't need free hardware - so sorry for the noise in that regard - just a heads up that I might be interested in joining the effort / trying my hand at porting one of those apps at some point)

[Raion]

Hey guys, I didn't notice people were still commenting here (apologies to both matyas and kbra!)

I'm kinda skinny on hardware atm, but I would be interested in bringing both of you on if either of you live in the US. Shipping to other countries is a giant pain.

[kbra]

Hi! Thanks for the kind response, Raion. To clarify, we actually found some hardware locally here (quite far from US), will be picking everything up today and seeing if we can diagnose and build a working workstation for myself and a friend out of those. Not sure if matyas is still looking for hardware or where he is situated at.

In any case, working on porting a bit more modern CSound on Irix would be on my to-do list once I get a system (possibly an O2 or an Octane at this rate) up and running. PD and Supercollider 3 (at least the synth and server modules) would be really nice as well, I just haven't looked into the requirements & dependencies yet at all.

[matyas]

Hey folks,

Sorry I didn’t see this- I’ve been pretty busy with the day job (robotics) on the one hand and my various programming and musical projects on the other, so I haven’t been checking in as regularly. Anyway, I do live in the US (Pittsburgh, PA, to be precise) and I am still looking for hardware. To address kbra’s thoghts, SuperCollider might indeed be kind of tricky. CSound and/or PD would probably be easier, possibly aided by the fact that IRIX ports of those programming environments existed back in the day, u like SuperCollider, which (to my knowledge) has only ever run on Mac, Linux, Windows, and possibly *BSD.
So yeah, Raion, if you do have any hardware to spare, I’d love to get involved, and kbra, if you’re actively engaged, I’d be interested in chatting.

One thing I’ve thought of: these are fairly large, complex projects. The upside of that is that porting reasonably recent versions of them to IRIX may involve porting/updating some libraries or other dependencies along the way, which would be beneficial to the wider community.