[massiverobot]

OK, now that I'm looking at installing 6.5.22 on my Indigo 4k (I was assuming i had a 3K and 5.3) what is the difference between the disk Images and the Network Install Images?

Why are the installation disks (1,2,3) called "overlay" instead of just say "installation disk 1..." ?

I'm going to have to do a net install as I have no SGI CDROM so I'll download the "network install images" but why are they different?

[dexter1]

The network-installs IRIX 6.5.22 tarballs found here are archives of the 6.5.22m installation directories as they appear on disk.

The disk images directory consists of tarballs of the entire disk images, so you either need to burn them on a cd or unpack them yourself.

The 6.5.22m installation media are called "overlay", except for the first disk: "Installation tools and overlay"
This is because IRIX installations consist of a base product "IRIX 6.5" and a separate quarterly update, or ovelays, to the base. These updates start at 6.5.1 and end with 6.5.30.

IRIX 6.5.22m is the last IRIX which support Indigo1 systems, and the last IRIX which supported R4000 processors.

So if you want to perform a net install, use the network-installs tarballs and unpack them on a Linux machine. Next set up that machine as the irix-install bootp server using either my docker image, DINA or irixboot.

[massiverobot]

Thanks again for this informative explanation. We'll see in a few days how this goes.