SGI Happenings

Posted on Jan 12, 2006

For anyone who reads my geekier posts, you’ll know that I have managed to find an old Origin 200 (though mine is missing the nice blue plastic). My efforts to install Linux on it ultimately failed, though I have since figured out what went wrong while hunting around the Suse Sparc message boards of all things. It turns out that headless installations of Linux go nuts sometimes if you do not remove the mingetty lines in the /etc/inittab file. If you don’t do this, the system refuses to boot and you get errors like this:

INIT: Id “3” respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

Unfortuately, by the time I read this post I had already wiped the SCSI drive I had been using in the Origin 200 for use elsewhere and could not test to see if this would resolve my issues. I had intended to go back and correct the issue with a fresh install but that won’t be happening now….

A friend of mine (former SGI employee) has managed to dig up an old copy of IRIX that will install for me instead. Since it’s an OS I’ve never played around with before I’m happy to use it instead of Linux, plus there are apparently some strange issues on Linux with the Origin 200 processor anyway. I’m currently in the middle of formatting the disk for IRIX now and hopefully will have it up and running before the weekend

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