IRiX or FreeBSD ?

[Brent Casavant]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Gregory Nou wrote:

> I recently get an Octane Station
> I have on HD with Irix, but since I do not have a license, I'm not
> likely to use it.
> I was wondering if I should try to get one, switch to freebsd, or
> install a linux.
> Could you tell me where the project is ? Is there a usable version ?

All machines shipped by SGI have a license to run some version of IRIX.
Chances are pretty good that your machine has IRIX 6.5 licensed for it,
and thus can legally use any version of IRIX up to 6.5.25.  The license
is not tied to the media the OS ships on, but to the machine itself,
and this license normally transfers with the machine.

I know of no operating system other than IRIX which runs on an Octane,
though NetBSD and maybe some others will run on O2 and other older SGI
hardware.  In addition, you are likely to be very disappointed with
anything other than IRIX if you want to use an SGI box for anything
more than curious OS hacking.  In particular XFree86 does not (to my
knowledge) support any graphics option in Octane, and only a few
options on older hardware such as Indy (and even then, non-accelerated).

As much as I love the BSDs, stick with IRIX unless you're interested
in porting the OS yourself.

Brent Casavant, SGI Kernel Engineer

-- 
Brent Casavant			http://www.angeltread.org/
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