[SunRescue] Speaking of SGI equipment...

[Dave McGuire]

On Thu, 16 Dec 1999, David Cantrell (at home) wrote:
>> Irix takes a bit of getting used to if you're a BSD person...but it's
>> quite nice when you get used to it, and it's very, very fast.
>
>Takes a bit of getting used to *whoever* you are.  It is nice though.  For
>home use it's excellent, but for a production environment I'm not so sure. 
>It's ... well, let's be charitable, and say that there's a lot more secure
>OSes around.

  Security is an attribute of a systems administrator, not an operating system.
I've run Irix in production just fine.  I still prefer pretty much any BSD
though...

>The GUI sucks too many cycles too, and I'm not brave enough to try removing
>it.  I'm *certainly* not brave enough to try installing an OS I'm more
>familiar with, such as Linux, on my Indy.

  What?  The windowing system is X.  Plain old X just like the X that runs on a
Linux box or a SPARC or anything else.  The GUI is implemented with 4dwm, the
window manager.  If you'd rather use a different window manager, it's no more
difficult to change that under Irix than it is under Linux.

  Give it a shot...I'm running Enlightenment on one of my SGI systems.  Took
all of five minutes to switch over after getting it built.

                            -Dave McGuire