Epic IRIX Fail

So, after my little bit of WGET Magic last night, by which I was able to download all of Nekoware, I find myself in a bit of a predicament today. I went to install a few different packages, one at a time, and found that I was having some pretty good success.

So I decided to a more complicated install, involving samba, Scribus, and GNU Screen (for my screen needs.) Unfortunately, it’s not too terribly easy to install all of those things at once. There were about a million and a half dependencies, and when I finally got to the last two dependencies, I came across this:

I am not sure what happened, but somewhere in the dependency train there was a breakdown. I think it was just a problem inst was having after having to create so many little temp folders for software installation, although it being industrial grade UNIX and all, I would have expected better.

To be fair though, IRIX 6.5.0 (I’m running 6.5.22, and the latest available version is 6.5.30-or-so) was released in August 1998, and dependencies weren’t such a huge problem on UNIX at the time, because either your system already had everything, or the software you were installing came with the dependencies already laid out for you.

What I think I need to do in the future is figure out how to successfully issue some kind of command to the system to un-tar all of the .tardist files, thuswise removing my problem of having to add each tardist file to the installation individually.

In other news, the SI card is, indeed, not recoverable. I believe it died from the heat of summer, which was why I was so adament about keeping the Octane inside the house, when it was at mom’s. I was unaware that the garage at dad’s would get so hot. At this point, I am unsure whether I should buy another IMPACT series graphics, just to have it die of heat exhaustion again.

The options if I don’t want to put money (a lot of it, given that the Octane is ten years old) into IMPACT graphics are to put even more money into a vPro/V6 graphics card, or continue to run the thing without graphics hardware.

One thing I could do is get an older X terminal like the HP Envizex that Lando just got. The advantage to doing that is that the HP Envizex (or other X11 terminals) can run apps on a variety of different UNIX machines. Even though I may have the Ultra60, the Octane and (hypothetically) an AIX box and an HP-UX box, I needn’t actually have a separate keyboard/mouse for each of them. Although a potential disadvantage, especially if I only have/use one X terminal, is that i might at some point want to locally log into one of the other machines. Also, the Envizex that I want from eBay can only display 256 colors.

Ahwell, since I can’t take the Octane back to NAU, I’ve got some time to decide what should be done about its graphics situation.

July 31, 2008 | Tags: , | No Comments »

SiliconGraphics Octane

Today’s project has involved my old SiliconGraphics Octane workstation. The basic goal was to get it set up, and make sure that it’s still running. An extended part of this has been to install the new 70GB hard disc, get IRIX migrated over, and with luck, install all or most of the Nekoware packages, which are like blastwave for Sun, in that they have most of the GNU utilities, and other open sourcde apps that people have ported over to Silicon Graphics’ IRIX operating system.

I was able to get the hard disc installed, and after a bit of convincing and googling, the thing was cloning the contents of the old 4GB hard disc onto the new drive. The cloning process was pretty easy, although it wasn’t something you’d do every Tuesday, like SuperDuper on a Mac. In fact, there’s gotta be a better way, especially since I was told to go into single-user mode for the operation. (Whether or not it’s actually required, I don’t know — but I did anyway.)

The bad news about today and today’s project is that somehow, I have managed to kill another graphics card. I do not know if it was my own doing, the doing of the heat in the garage, or if it was something else, but I do know that the Octane’s SolidImpact graphics card (which is, by the way, bigger than the motherboard on your laptop, even if your laptop is a Dell XPS M1730) is now unable to bring the machine all the way to a desktop, it coredumps right before the machine would typically show a login prompt, and then says to restart or turn it off. The machine fails diagnostics with the card, and passes diagnostics without it.

So I’m left to draw the only available conclusion, which is that the machine needs a new graphics card. A bit later on tonight I am going to try to swap the graphics card into one of the other XIO slots, and if that works then great, but if not, I’m going to have to look at getting another SI/SE, or maybe a higher end graphics card. I have been saying for quite awhile that I’d like an SSI/SSI or MXI/MXE.

For now, I’m just downloading and installing Nekoware, which is a huge set of packages. It’s downloading alphabetically from one of the mirrors (I’m using wget), and it’s still at GCC. (It’s less than half of the way through the 154mb of GCC, even.)

July 30, 2008 | No Comments »

Two Extremes

It seems as though every time I am visiting Kingman, I rock back and forth (not very gently) between two pretty drastic extremes. The extreme of having a very full day of walking everywhere there is to go in Valle Vista, and the extreme of sitting on my rump in the same place for twelve straight hours. Yesterday’s extreme was the former, with a trip to the storage locker about three miles down the road, then back another three miles, in the absolute heat of the day. Luckily I was able to borrow a huge water pak from my brother, but I do still think that there were negative effects of having done that. Today’s extreme was the latter, a marathon of Eureka on the SciFi channel.  I was able to see Eureka at the right time, and now I know (for later in the week) that I will be able to see Dr. Who on time. Epic.

July 29, 2008 | Tags: | 2 Comments »

So, What Happened to Photo365?

It occurs to me that two days in a row now, I’ve forgotten to take photos for Photo365. I think I’m done with it for 2008, at least for now anyway.

What happened to it though? I’m really not sure. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I was taking so many pictures, I forgot to actually work on them in photoshop. Add to that, I was away from my Mac long enough (and now I’m away for another week or so) that I never actually got the chance to look through the photos on a color-accurate display. (the ThinkPad purports to be color-accurate, but I don’t know how much I really trust the color on any laptop.)

So part of it is that I put myself into the attitude that I wasn’t going to succeed with Photo365 unless I took a zillion pictures every day, so many pictures that it was very easy to fall behind on catalogging them, or even organizing them and putting them in the right place, let alone editing them.

There are a lot of photos from the summer that I’m excited to share, so my project from this point forward is keywording all of my existing photos, and putting more of them through photoshop, and putting them on Flickr. When the school year starts, I will resume carrying my camera with me as often as I can.

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"That was easy!" :P (Or "Que Facil" if you push the Spanish button)

Another Megan-Girlfriend post. I was gonna put this in my blog, but then realized it belonged here. :P

So, you’ll NEVER GUESS what’s coming into the shopping center near my house!! NEVER EVER EVER GUESS!!

Okay, maybe you can, if you read the title of this post.

But I’m going to hold out for suspense reasons.

In the shopping center near my house, which is not the most glamorous, well-archetected structures for stores – in fact, many stores do not survive there, save for the grocery store, the bike shop, the post office and the water store which has been there since I was 5 – they have ripped out an entire section behind one of the big facade front shops. Like, there’s the sidewalk part with the overhang and columns and where the signs should be, and then where the windows and doors and entrances into the shops should be, there’s NOTHING! A huge hole, they ripped everything out behind it. (Okay, there’s fences there now, but not the point). We’d been wondering what they were putting in that was so important as to demolish a whole section of the complex to remodel it.

Well, the answer is, a Staples! :D

Dude, we have NO Staples here in Tucson! It’s been a strictly Office Max/Depot town forEVER. And lookie! NOW WE’RE GETTING A STAPLES!!! RIGHT NEXT TO MY HOUSE!!! :D Sa-WEET! I’m sure that’ll make Cory wanna come visit me down here more often, right, right? Okay, probably not, but whatever.

Til some other time!
This is Megan
Peace out.

July 28, 2008 | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »
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