Gerald Heinig wrote:

> Michael Graziano wrote:
> >
> > I was wondering if anyone has had any luck running the SGI port on older machines, specifically the Personal Iris (4D) series.  We have a bunch of these at my school with Irix 5.3, but no install media or root passwords to get into them (kinda makes them useless to us), and even with the sgi port incomplete it's better than nothing.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > /~mikeg
>
> It's a good bet they use SCSI disks, so take the boot disk out, hang it onto a PC SCSI bus and read out the disk with dd, search for the passwd entry and delete the root password.
> That's what I did to get into an old HP700 box from college.

One of the machines is still in bootable condition, and this is probably the way to go for that one.  I'll definately give that a try tomorrow afternoon.

>
> You can buy Irix 5.3 from Ebay. There's a guy selling SGI software.
>
> About the machines: I have a feeling the _really_ old machines were 68000-based (corrections, anyone? It's just a wild hunch). If that's the case, you're way off base here.

I'm not a big Irix fan, but if it comes down to that I can probably get the old tapes for it out of storage at school.  I would much rather put an open-source O/S that is still being developed actively on the machines though.

The CPU is (according to http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/2258/4dfaq.html#periris ), (IP10) MIPS R3000.

>
> I don't think we'll have anything bootable by your machines for a long time, unless I'm much mistaken.

If NetBSD is out of the question for now, I am open to other suggestions.  I'd like to avoid irix if possible.

thanks,
/~mikeg