Good to see some folks using my 'irixboot' utility in the wild. Looks like it worked!<p>Also, the whole process by which the Development CD image is extracted could have been easily handled by irixboot and you can use irixboot as a 'dist' install source within the already-installed OS.
A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then).<p>There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at all. Now I know why we kept only O2s on desktops and Octanes were in 'server room' when we did work on them.
Very fun read. There is something really enjoyable about stories of people solving the problem at hand in the most straightforward way possible, even when that means digging into all kinds of low-level details that are usually abstracted away for us.
I had a SGI Indy as my desktop machine in the mid-90s. It was a really awesome system at the time and I still miss it. A couple of random things that I remember:<p>- The 'lp' account (for the printing system) was not protected by a password on IRIX installs for the longest time. You could telnet in and exploit df(1) [1] and you'd have root. I obtained shells on a number of SGIs around the 'net in this manner back in the day. Good times!<p>- The author mentioned not being able to run EZSetup over an X11 session. As I recall, many of the graphical system utilities SGI's proprietary framework, which used some proprietary extensions that would not render over vanilla X11. The only way you could run them was from another SGI (using X11 forwarding) or from the local console. I'll bet this is why EZSetup never ran for you.<p>So much fun. I'm alllllmost tempted to go looking for an Indy on eBay. :)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19274/" rel="nofollow">https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19274/</a>
Not too bad. I was expecting the first shaving step to be about the OS media requiring 520 byte sectors and thus needing a "fancier" CD writer/reader. Maybe that was Sun, not SGI?
While interesting, a yak shave is where you go off on a long excursion to solve a problem that helps you solve the <i>real</i> problem. This, on the other hand, is just having a hobby. Calling it yak shaving doesn't seem appropriate.