Hi Forum

What is SGI Irix like...?

It is not Linux, it is UNIX, will it run over Intel processors...?

Is it still supported...?

BRGDS

Alex

IRIX was silicon graphics version of sysv unix for their workstations/servers. There hasn't been a new release in >3 years as far as I know and I see less and less of it in the field compared to what I used to see... as far as I know they switched predominately to running redhat for their newer stuff. Apparently existing support for irix running on sgi hardware ends 2013. It was a real innovator in its time, kinda makes me a) feel old and b) sad that it's going away completely.

Irix is dead, long live irix and all that jazz.

Irix only ran on SGI's own MIPS systems, AFAIK you can't run it on an x86 processor. The lab I worked in had a bunch of old SGI workstations from the days when Linux and commodity hardware couldn't handle serious graphical work. Irix was a very pretty OS, but its package management was a disaster (circular dependencies, packages obstinately failing to install, etc.).

FWIW, SGI itself is no longer ann independent company, they were bought by Rackable Systems last year.

Cool. SGI bought Cray. Then some unknown name company buys them. In the 1990's it took millions just to buy one Cray computer.

A couple of years ago one of our departments bought a massively parallel SGI system for doing geological modeling. It got installed with SUSE Linux. The SGI rep said that SUSE was being much more responsive getting the special kernel stuff taken care of that they needed. The machine had some sort of backchannel superfast communication between CPUs that came from Cray technology.

Irix may have had some innovation, but it also was wide open to hackers. They didn't seem to think much about security.

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It was heavily used on graphic workstations and I think they let somethings slide to the wayside for ease of use and convenience. It was still a pretty great system in its time and I'm sad to see it going away completely. With several version of unix dying and going away it seems like we started with unix which branched widely and now we're heading back to a unix singularity... which may not be a bad thing in the long run, but it does make me kinda sad.

Maybe I'll pick up a classic sgi for old times sake.

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If you wish to try an IRIX implementation for your Linux desktop you can always check out MaXX Desktop.

http://www.maxxdesktop.com/site/?page_id=2

or just grab an O2 off of ebay