[rescue] Sources of IRIX?

[Liam Proven]

On 12 February 2017 at 02:49, r.stricklin <bear at typewritten.org> wrote:
>
> Ha. Yes.
>
> Summary:
>
> 1. Spend 5 weeks downloading Slackware 1.1.mumble at 9600 BPS off the only
HST
> BBS node in town.
> 2. Scrounge 70+ 3.5" floppies
> 3. Write out 70+ 3.5" floppies from disk image files
> 4. Discover they've all been written incorrectly.
> 5. Write out 70+ 3.5" floppies from disk image files correctly.
> 6. Discover the SCSI host adapter in my PC is not supported.
> 7. At all.
>
> ok
> bear.


Ahahaha!

That was somewhat close to my experience.

I had -- have! -- a Sunrace 486DX50 (i.e. *not* DX/2 50) notebook with
an onboard IDE disk and built-in SCSI. I had a Bernoulli drive and a
CD-ROM on the SCSI port. It only seemed to support 2 devices, sadly.

It worked a treat with OS/2 2.0.

But Slackware... after borrowing a CD burner at work to make the CD,
which was a big deal in 1996, and downloading and writing 3 root/boot
floppies plus modules, I _could not_ get it to recognise the SCSI
adapter. What I didn't know was that although many kernel modules took
IRQ, DMA and I/O values, the syntax was entirely dependent on the
module author and varied... and nobody could give me the correct
syntax for the AHA152x module.

I never did get it to work.

I had a similar experience a few years later with a Sun SPARCstation
IPX. I had no CD, and no SCSI CD that could do B= kB blocks. But I
could read a Red Hat 4.2 SPARC CD on my Linux PC, and share it.

But the SPARCstation had a floppy drive. So I needed to write a boot
floppy, and use it to access an NFS-shared CD over the LAN.

RH's docs didn't cover this. Solaris docs didn't cover this. Many
people had ideas but nobody knew how.

As it happens, a personal friend was a senior Sun support guy. He
didn't know either and could not work it out.

In the end I got 3 totally different, conflicting sets of canonical
These Are Right, Trust Me instructions. All were wrong. All disagreed.

But a mixture of bits of all of them made it work, in a way that all
the involved parties were sure was weird, wrong, couldn't or shouldn't
work. But did.

To discover that RH 4.2 for SPARC was a POS and kernel-panicked
multiple times a day. :B,/

--
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