James R. Quinby
jquinby  (at)  node  (dot)  to

...return to the packet
 
So now you have an SGI Indy.

Now what do I do with it?

Fire-sale at a dot-com? Your company end-of-lifed some little blue slabs? And you grabbed one? You plug it in, and lo! It boots!

Now what?

Relax. There's plenty you can do with this thing.

There are plenty of other documents scattered around out there that describe, in painful detail, the ins and outs of SGI hardware. I highly recommend you start with the FAQs. You also might want to familiarize yourself a little with Irix.

It should go without saying that Irix is a pretty good Unix, and you should be able to run any of the standard internet-type services just fine on an Indy - the one I use was formerly the corporate e-mail gateway. It would have been fine for running bind or SOCKS, too.

The things listed below are sort of above and beyond that, should you already have boxes around dedicated to those sorts of things.

If your system didn't come with install media, you want to locate some. You can pick up Irix media on e-bay, or try contacting SGI. The rest of this document will spell out my occasional adventures with a (nearly) complete SGI Indy I came into. In no particular order, here are some things I've cobbled together from various websites or through my own groping around. This should be considered a work in progress.

  • Try to get your hands on a complete set of install media. CD sets can be had on e-bay. Don't waste your time looking for ISO images on the web. Trust me. If your Indy is the same vintage as mine, you'll only be able to install Irix 6.2. If your system didn't come with the development options installed, compiling stuff is going require building as many of the GNU tools as possible. Helpful hint: the GNU ld has not yet been ported to Irix (as of the time of this writing) Neither has as. Ouch. The rest of the binutils will build, though.

  • A healthy amount of open-source software is available all packaged up for the Indy here. Note that the packages have been compiled for Irix 6.5 and later. Lack of installed development options will cause lots of these packages to fail dependency checks during the install process.

  • If you scored a camera as part of your package, here's how to take stills with it: 
    $ vidtomem -f pic -z 1/2 
$ imgcopy -fjfif pic-00000.rgb pic.jpg
    Toss these into a crontab or a CGI script, and you've got a webcam. Not a bad fate for a machine that cost many thousands of dollars a few years ago.

  • Speaking of the camera, you should note the video input jack on the back. Run capture_galileo, then Tools -> Video Panel. Change the 'Default In' from IndyCam to Analog Source. Hook up your video source. You can take vidcaps now from the capture screen by hitting the camera icon in the lower-left corner. Here's an example. Use the imgcopy command from above to conver the RGB files to JPGs.

  • The SGI windowmanager, 4Dwm, is nice, but I couldn't (easily) figure out how to customize it like I'm used to doing on the various Linux and *BSD boxes I've used. Many of the window managers are the SGI freeware site were failing to install, and since I couldn't build all the GNU tools I needed, blackbox was out. I eventually found that ctwm would compile and install. But how to get it as the default windowmanager?

    edit the file /var/X11/xdm/Xsession.dt. Jump down to where you see xdm starting 4Dwm, comment it out and add 
    /usr/bin/X11/ctwm
    Do the same with the files 
    Xsession-remote.0: 
/usr/bin/X11/ctwm > /dev/console 2>&1 &

Xsession.0: 
/usr/bin/X11/ctwm &
    Log out, then back in. You should be looking at a regular 'ol TWM-style window manager. You can customize ctwm with a .ctwmrc file in your home directory. Useful things to have on your menus: 
    [...]

"SGI Toolchest" f.exec  "/usr/bin/X11/toolchest -name ToolChest&"
"IndyCam"       f.exec  "/usr/sbin/capture_galileo&
"Lock"          f.exec  "xlock -mode random"
  • The Indy has pretty good sound support. Because of its low profile case, I considered turning it into an MP3 player. Naturally, none of the mp3 players I wanted would run, but I scrounged around until I found mxaudio, which was reported to run just fine on Irix 6.2. But the company that distributed it was in the midst of a website redesign, so you couldn't download it anyway.

    Or so I though. On a whim, I tried their FTP site. Bingo. All binaries present and accounted for. I downloaded mxaudio for 6.2 Irix on MIPS... and found out I was missing an audio library. Ditto for the Irix 5.3 version. About to give up hope, I found a website in Germany where someone was hosting a tarball that had the mxaudio player and the required library.

    For fear that it will also disappear from the web, I've mirrored it here. Become root, cd to / and untar it. You will need to export your LD_LIBARY_PATH to include /usr/local/lib. In bash, that's 
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib
    ...then run mxaudio. Note that the UI isn't quite as flashy as xmms or the other popular players. You can't do much with the playlist, and to add to the current playlist, you have to send mxaudio commands from another window. But it plays. Hook some speakers up to the back (I'm using the headphone jack) and you're on your way. Stuff the hard drive full of tunes and rock on.

  • This is in the SGI FAQ, but it bears repeating. If your Indy is sending lots of traffic to sgidog.mcast.net, the objectserver is to blame. If you could care less about objectservers, add '-t 0' to /etc/config/objectserver. Problem solved.