As for the original question. I don't have an Octane, but I have had my eye on them including those sold on Ebay in Australia by networkr I think. Anyway as far as I have been able to reseach, you may be able to get it to run in console mode only through a serial port -- but probably NOT. There has been moderate success with the very older Indys but not much else.
The mips port for linux is quite thorough but is mostly centered around the embeded market. The primary problem is the video subsystem and possibly the audio as well. SGI have not at any time made availlable the details necessary to build drivers for the video system. The IP30 (Octanes) have heaps of asics for the video and there aren't any data sheets to be had.
Consequently those wonderful machines start to look less attractive, Irix might be fun but thats not what this newsgroup is about. ;-) A real pity with all that custom fully OpenGl horsepower to be had.
Going by what you (Jasper) wrote if its a 400 Mhz machine its probably an R12000 unit or less likely at that price an R14000. Good luck and if you have any success or trip over any new information please email me. That goes for anyone else out there too.....
Because I am dead keen to have one of these babies. Along with my other obscene wish -- a fast Alpha. ( I have a 900 Mhz Samsung Alpha cpu) I just need a whole machine/motherboard to put it in.
Cheers. D.
Richard Neal wrote:
Give me $2k and I would build a kick arse AMD 64 bit machine
On Tue, 2003-12-09 at 17:34, Jasper Streit wrote:
I was wasting time on ebay today (as you do) and stumbled across this australian crowd selling some nice SGI octane boxes at around AU$2000(for the 400Mhz) and felt the urge to spend. I'm curious to see just how effective these enormously expensive beasts are- after all, the one i am looking at in particular comes with a really nice sound setup.
A little google research on linux running on the octanes, there was a lot of mixed reports of the success or impossibility of running such a machine. very confusing.
Basically i was just wondering if anybody on this list runs a MIPS box with any success?
Am i simply mad or is there a world of computing possibility out there???
Cheers,
Jasper
-- "Never ascribe to malice that which may adequately be explained by incompetence." - Napoleon Bonaparte
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
