IRiX or FreeBSD ?

[Mark Andrews]

Brent Casavant wrote:

>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.
>  
>
I'm relatively new to this list and have a few SGI boxes at home running 
IRIX 6.5.X. One is
an Indy R5K IP22 and the other an O2 R5K IP32.

I've got a spare boot disk for the Indy and am wondering if FreeBSD or 
any of the BSDs
will install and function on it.

I totally agree with Brent that IRIX is the best host operating system 
for these boxes, since
it was developed on that hardware.

Oh, how I remember the days of IRIX 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4 .... and I'm still 
waiting for IRIX 6.6.