[rescue] Sources of IRIX?

[J. Alexander Jacocks]

Richard,

It was a couple of hours, easily, the last time that I installed it on any
of the non-last-gen equipment (i.e. Indigo 2, O2, Octane), simply due to
the need to dynamically catalog all of the available CDs, before actually
doing any work.  Dave'e point is also very valid; not many folks are simply
going to sit in place, and wait for CDs to needs swapping.

Honestly, it's such an experience that I'd bet at least a few home users
have been put off SGIs by it.  Defintely, setting up an install server
obviates the issue, but how many folks actually do that, without a
significant commitment to the platform?

- Alex

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 12:45 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:

> In article <alpine.BSF.2.20.1702121354310.1841 at blueshift.celestrion.net>,
>     Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> writes:
>
> > On Sat, 11 Feb 2017, Richard wrote:
> >
> > >> Take my word for it: you never, ever, ever want to install IRIX
> software
> > >> from CD-ROM.  It is a horrifying orgy of disk-swapping.
> > >
> > > I've done it a bunch of times and it isn't as painful as you describe.
> >
> > But if you're going to do it more than once, I recommend setting up an
> > IRIX install server.  Linux has support for reading EFS volumes (might
> > need to be compiled as a module, since most OS vendors don't include it).
>
> True, this is easier.  In my case, linux machines weren't available at
> the time, so I just did the machines one by one.  We installed IRIX
> 6.5.22 on a bunch of octanes over a period of a couple hours one
> evening.  I think I had 2 CD-ROM drives that would work at the time,
> so there was a little bit of parallelism, but not much.
>
> From the way people on this list are talking about the experience,
> you'd think it was multiple hours per machine.
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