The opportunity has arisen for me to pick up an ancient SGI, and I'd like to know if anyone can tell me if I should even bother with it. I want to know if this system will be capable of running Houdini Apprentice decently before I plunk down 200 dollars for it. The system is an Octane with an SE graphics system, 250 Mhz R10k CPU, 512 Megs of RAM, and a 9 gig HD, running Irix 6.5.15. I really just want to play with an SGI, and at 200 dollars it's tough to pass up. It'd be nice if it could run Houdini Apprentice though so I could actually do something useful with it. Anyone got an idea how well it will do? I don't expect much from it, but will it be useful with Apprentice?

Hey Michael,

I'm sure it'll run Apprentice fine. Just imagine you're using a PIII 450Mhz machine with a GeForce2, I guess. One good thing though is the OpenGL support.

Cheers!
steven

Thanks, that's what I wanted to hear. Houdini runs OK on my linux box, but the graphics drivers ATI and Nvidia put out have issues, are prone to crashing and I can't afford to shell out 400-2000 dollars for a pro graphics card. I was hoping I could build and animate little things for a demo reel on the Octane, without the fear of X locking up at the worst possible moment, and render from the console on my much faster PC.

Well, I bought the thing. Got some free RAM with it (640 Megs) and it has an older SSI graphics system. It runs considerably better than a P3 450 with a Geforce 2. It's not incredibly fast, but it's solid, and it's better than I hoped. It's deffinitely slow if I try to render or whatever, but it runs Houdini excellently with great OpenGL support for the little things I'm doing. I'm very happy with it It's going to work out nicely.

One question though for any Irix users. Houdini was really washed out the first time I started it, so I adjusted the gamma in Irix's display settings to fix it. I saved this gamma profile, and told Irix to use it on next boot, but the gamma profile doesn't load. I have to manually load it every time I restart. Any idead how to fix it? I saved the gamma profile to my home directory (usr/people/mike) is there maybe a system gamma profile I need to edit?

Oh, also, I have been FTPing stuff back and forth between the Octane and my Linux system. Is there some kind of LAN browser (something like network neighborhood) I could use? Or does anyone know how to mount shared drives over a network? I'm not really up on networking in Unix, and I didn't get any manuals with this thing.

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/init.cgi [techpubs.sgi.com]

this might help a little…don't go crazy - there is lots there

MichaelC
One question though for any Irix users. Houdini was really washed out the first time I started it, so I adjusted the gamma in Irix's display settings to fix it.

Rather than struggling with the Irix system to change the gamma, you can just change Houdini's internal gamma. This will change the gamma used for all the UI, but you will still have to keep the Octane's gamma in mind when rendering.

To change Houdini's gamma, try setting:
setenv HOUDINI_UI_GAMMA 1.2
You can also play with HOUDINI_UI_CONTRAST, HOUDINI_UI_BRIGHTNESS, and HOUDINI_UI_SATURATION.

As for avoiding ftping all the time, you can mount each other's drive using NFS. If your octane is named “octane” and linux “linux”, doing something like:
on octane:
mkdir /n
in /etc/fstab, add
linux /n/linux nfs exec,dev,suid,rw 1 1

I think a similar process would work for the cross mount. THen you can set your paths to /n/linux/…. and have the hip file work on both systems without change.

Thanks so much for the tips. The Houdini gamma setting is what I needed. Irix looks fine, it was just the interface to Houdini that was washed out.

just as a follow-up.

1. on the sgi do a “man gamma”. You will see that
the file you're looking for was: /etc/config/system.glGammaVal

2. As root on the sgi you can use the “gamma” command. eg: “gamma 1.7” although this won't
save the value between boots.

3. It's good practice to make 2 dirs called “/nfs” and “/mnt” and mount local filesystems on “/mnt” (eg. local disks) and remote filesystems under “/nfs” (eg. “/nfs/linux-box” on the sgi). Don't be tempted to mount filesystems in the root dir (ie. “/linux-box”) as this can badly affect the filesystem traversal that goes on during command execution (eg. when you type “ls”) if for some reason you have NFS problems (eg. NFS timeouts).

4. You will also need to edit /etc/exports to allow the mounts to occur. For example, on the sgi you would need a line something like:

/usr/people/fred -rw,access=linux-box

so that you could mount fred's sgi home dir somewhere on the linux-box (and you would do the reverse sort of thing on /etc/exports on the linux box so that the sgi could gain access permission). Nb. the linux syntax for /etc/exports can be different to IRIX.

5. You will need the hostnames of the linux & sgi computers entered in the /etc/hosts files on both machines. Else /etc/exports won't know what you're talkin'bout.

6. Use the command “exportfs” to see what filesystems are exported, and to where/whom. Keep in mind there can be all sorts of security issues with this. Once you start exporting filesystems to other machines, then you'd want to also consider what external network connections you have, and how you've restricted that access. Eg. put all you machines under some internal-only IP range, and block that range at a firewall. yada yada. ying yang.

cheers,
ben.

PS. Uh! Gotta love those old sgi's! Good Choice!
$200. that's amazing.. baaargain!

$200? Michael, do you know if they're selling any more Octanes at that price? I've been wanting to buy an sgi, particularly an Octane for the longest time. The cheapest I've seen them online is like $450 at reputable.com.
I live in California btw.

(crossing my fingers)

Hey DaJuice,

Check your PMs on odforce