Projects

Silicon Graphics (SGI) O2 - August 31, 2025

I acquired this machine in a small lot of UNIX systems, in "project" conditon. It did not start up, and would just flash a red light on the front when plugged in. This ended up being a simple problem caused by dirty connections. I went in and reseated all of the RAM and the boards into the backplane, and it started right up! That was the least of the struggles though. It did not have a good hard drive, so I had to replace the hard drive, and then learn how to install IRIX. Anyone who has installed IRIX before knows how much of a pain it is, and it is made even worse when the optical drive doesn't work at all, so I was stuck learning how to do a network install. Thankfully, there is a handy tool out there, called "LOVE" (yes, we love that tool). I installed it on my Ubuntu laptop, connected the Ubuntu laptop directly to the O2 with an ethernet cable, configured IP addresses, and ran the program- the O2 liked it and did a net install (with a ton of commands entered on my part). Once completed, IRIX itself is actually incredibly intuitive, so it has been fun to mess with. It has had a cumulative 40+ days of uptime running here, and seems to be running great! It has been fun playing with the video recording tools, and I intend to either install or create an application that allows streaming over the network- more on that in the near future. Updated 11/06/2025