I'm in the exact some situation as you. I burned the sgimips netbsd
iso right to a CD, realizing only later that I'll need to do some
special work to get my O2 to be able to read it.
I assume that the guides available on the web [some of them are
debian-related I believe] that tell how to properly format and setup
the CD so that an SGI box will be able to boot from it will be all
that we'd need to do?