Rare graphic station SGI Indy. 20 years later. Part two. Install IRIX

In the first post, I unearthed SGI Indy on the mezzanine and put in order its hardware stuffing. Now it's time to get started with the software.

I’m writing this article post-factum, and therefore I can already say that installing IRIX in practice is much easier than even Linux, but there are some nuances that are very difficult to deal with because of the non-obviousness of the actions and the scarcity of feedback during the installation process.

In addition, I want to warn you that I did not photograph the installation process directly in real time (it is rather difficult to take a screen on a DSLR in complete darkness), so I reproduced the pictures below separately using the terminal of an already working system and Photoshop magic.

So, the distribution image downloaded from the torrent is cut into CD-R without any problems. IRIX installation disks are mapped to SGI Disklabel, not ISO. The sash loader (StandAlone SHell) is located in the Volume Header, and there is a separate data section. Therefore, I could not see the contents of the disc on Mac OS X immediately after recording.
We insert the disk into the external SCSI drive, select the boot from the CD-ROM from the menu. The disk begins to read, after which the computer freezes. I could not figure out the reason for this behavior. Perhaps the fact is that the original installation disks are somehow marked, or the case is a buggy drive. However, launching the shell from the disk manually from the console with the command was boot -f dksc(0,2,8)sashARCSsuccessful.



Before installing the system, you must reformat the Debian disk. To do this, we use the fx program (an analogue of fdisk). Load it from the installation the CD: boot -f dksc(0,2,7)stand/fx.ARCS --x. Please note that the disk partition is changing, as I wrote above. The loader is separate from the rest of the files. We





get something like this: When I saw the auto item, I joyfully chose it, as a result of which the newcomer quit smoking for about a day. Because the breakdown in automatic mode, as it turned out, implies low-level formatting of the disk and searching for bad sectors, performing a series of read / write checks and many more operations that I did not find. In general, the violent crackling of the disc stopped after about a day. I turned on the monitor and saw a message that the disk was ready and a prompt to reboot to apply the changes.
Run sash again from the CD-ROM. When the disk is broken, format it with the command mkfs / dev / dsk / dks0d1s0. By default, the partition is formatted in UFS. Perhaps there was an option to select the XFS file system, which just appeared in IRIX 5.3, but I did not use it.

Formatting is exactly the same nuance, because of which I rebooted the machine 5 times, interchanging the SCSI ID of the broom with the drive and shamanizing with the parameters in the PROM. The installer simply cursed at the lack of a file system on the partition Inst: Can't mount root filesystem /dev/dsk/dks0d1s0and then suggested rebooting. The solution was found in the IRC channel #IRIX.

Now it's time to start the actual installation of IRIX. We load sashand launch again inst. The installer takes a very long time to unpack to a newly formatted disk. At the end, the main menu appears.inst:




Here, I also relied on automation and performed list first. A list of packages ready for installation appeared on the screen. Since the default choice suited me completely (everything except Dev Tools is checked), I immediately typed go and the installation started. After half an hour, without any additional questions about the post configuration familiar to Linux, the system rebooted from the hard drive immediately to xdm with a set of default users, among which was root without a password.


(The screenshot was taken after I added myself to the list of users)

In the next part of the article, I will log in to IRIX and promise a lot of screenshots. Watch out for the tape.


In the process of installing the system, I used the instructions from software.majix.org/irix/install-index.shtml .