[geeks] IRIX install thoughts and questions

[Rob Fielding]

>>And that is one wierd installer. IIUC the things I read on 
>>the net, this
>>is an _improvement_ over earlier IRIX installers??? Eeekkk!!! 

> *shrug* it does the job :)

Indeed apt and aptitude it is not, however pedantic you think resolving conflicts are, as least it's going to leave you with a fully working system - 
well in my experience it always has - and I've reinstalled plenty of configs plenty of times in my early learning days....

Little tip - upgrade 6.5.14 ASAP - it's a dog with it's badly broken media libraries. Not that you'll get much further with a 2GB disk, see below ....

>>One other thing, how do I tell how much disk I need for an update? The
>>6.5.14 update just failed because I was 300k short on the root
>>partition. Obviously I can whack something, but I do need an idea of
>>where to begin. The original install was pure defaults and I 
>>did not see
>>(which is not to say it wasn't there) anything in the relnotes.

Right. Stop. Buy a 9GB disk AT LEAST. I've seen countless posts with peeps trying to live with a 4 GB or less drive in the world of IRIX - especially 
with the development libs and extras such as applications and NFS - not to mention all the lovely http://freeware.sgi.com you'll want to install.

First, all your packages come as tar files - mostly not gzip'd. Most of the time you'll have to extract these yourself into another directory unless 
you want inst to kill the original tar (at least in my experience). That means 2 lots of the same thing. I basically have all my cd images, overlays 
and other extras, like the entire freeware respoitory (tar'd and extracted) hosted on a linux NFS server on my network, simply to get over the hassle 
of fiddling around with CD's or using too much disk space on my SGI boxen. IDE drivers are cheap :)

Next, overlays you get from SGI support (and if you join the dev program you can get 6.5.20f for free) are HUGE. 1.2GB download, which you'll want to 
either stick on another disk or on the same one if space and speed aren't an issue for you. Installing one of them can take upwards of 2 hours 
depending - but they are good insofar as they roll up all fixes for all platforms for all the IRIX 6.5 releases before it. So thats 1.2GB for the 
download and say another 1.5GB for extracted (sgi saw sense with the latest overlays, as they are all gzip'd now). Actual installation might only vary 
by 30MB which is nice - but if you are cutting it so close to the limit of the disk then that's really you own look out.

Like I said, you might not have the resources to stick all those CD's onto a load of spare disks, however I gave up with the 12-step-irix-install CD 
dance years ago :)

>>One last bit, is there a good web site that talks of whatever
>>differences there are between admining "average" unix and Irix?

Good websites are techpubs.sgi.com and the ever great http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/sgi.html and the upcoming http://nekochan.net/


Hope this helps,


-- 

Rob Fielding
Development 	Designer Servers Ltd 	www.dsvr.co.uk