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.
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.
Back when I was in high school SGI brought their truck[1] full of all their toys to our school for the students to tour. That was a good day. I'll never forget the refrigerator-sized Onyx2 running a 3D flight simulator across three displays.
j/k, of course, but it's clearly the heaviest desktop system I've ever seen.
Every Fuel has standard DVI, although Fuels have other drawbacks
- 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!
- 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.
So much fun. I'm alllllmost tempted to go looking for an Indy on eBay. :)
If I was trying to do this project, I'd just do what it took to get an EFS-supporting OS up and running, expose via NFS, and be done with it.
