I have an offer from a friend of a choice of Indy or O2 Octane Sgi machine with monitor and was wandering if anyone knew if it was possible to install BeOS or Haiku on it?
I also have my eye on a video outboard going for less than $100 on ebay which would be awsome if I could get it working under Be as I always wanted to do video in BeOS!
Failing that, if someone has a BeBox they want to sell to me?
Those SGI machines seem to run on MIPS hardware. Haiku or BeOS only support x86 and PowerPC.
These machines all run IRIX 6.5, which is in maintenance mode. You will need an SGI support contract to receive security updates, or you should run the machine disconnected from the public network. There is some very good AV application software available for IRIX, although some it looks a bit dated these days, and it may be rather expensive considering the machine itself is a gift.
Alternatively you could investigate installing a Linux variant on it, most of the hardware in an Octane is supported but obviously you’ll have to find an SGI-specific Linux distribution or roll your own system which might be beyond your capabilities.
Those are basically your only two options, even NetBSD doesn’t have a port to this particular type of MIPS hardware.
Despite the fact that there are obviously better things to focus on than porting Haiku to obsolete hardware, it’d still be dead cool to run it on these machines.
If I were you I’d get an Octane anyway and run Linux on it. They’re rather hot and noisy though - I was half thinking of getting one off eBay just to look cool and help warm my flat in the winter.
François Revol has just started work on an m68k port (processor used in Macs prior to PowerPC, Acorn and NeXT’s machines) so although no-one is working on a MIPS port at the moment, who knows what will happen in the future? There are a lot of MIPS devices out there that Haiku would be great on.
IRIX is nothing to be sneezed at anyway.
Thanks for the advice guys, it is appreciated, and to be honest, I thought as much about the compatible OS choices.
I just thought that since there are no BeBoxes on th internet to buy at the moment, it would be cool own some thing that looked as cool and ran BeOS!
Oh well, I will just have to build something awesome in a custom box to run Haiku when the first full release is available!
Acorn’s machines (and “modern” hardware running RISCOS) use ARM processors not Motorola. The early ones are a very curious architecture (e.g. 26-bit addresses, no floating point) and the newer ones are if anything even more strange, although they’re used in things like mobile phones so you can get Linux and Windows variants to run on them.
Perhaps you were thinking of the Amiga ? What machine is François testing this on anyway ?
I was sort of curious about that also…
I see that he allocated for both mac and atari already in at least one of his codefiles.
Yes, Amigas, right you are.