SGI Indy - remap keyboard?

[tingo]

Is a SGI Indy on tiopic here? I hope so.
I have an old SGI Indy, with the IndyCam (more info on my Indy page). The machine has no floppy or optical drive, but came with IRIX 6.2 installed. I have no IRIX cd's either.

I don't have a SGI monitor for it, so I use a 13W3-to-VGA adapter and connect it to one of my LCD monitors. This works well.

I don't have a SGI keyboard, so I use a "normal" "modern-pc" keyboard on it. This doesn't as good as the monitor solution. Some keys one the keyboard produce the wrong function on the Indy. For ecample, the Ctrl key works as "caps lock", Esc - "num lock", ScrLock - "*", and the menu key - works as Escape (at least in vi).

Is there a way to remap the keyboard (or individual keys in IRIX?

 

[pontus]

Sure is on topic in my book

Since it is a unix system, look into xmodmap if it exists.

otherwise you could head over to forums.nekochan.net, those guys there know an awful lot about IRIX. Some of the have accounts here too though.

/P

 

[shawn510]

That's strange. I've never noticed any issues on my Octane or O2 with regular keyboards. What is the max ver of Irix that a Indy will take? I have a set of Irix CDs, but they may bee too new for your system.

 

[tingo]

"The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22." according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy

It doesn't say whether 6.5.22 will work on a Indy with just 64 Megs RAM (and two 1.08 Gig drives).

And how I'm going to get a new version of IRIX installed onto my Indy when said Indy doesn't have a CD-ROM drive is still unclear to me.

 

[NeXT]

Running an Indy on 6.5 and with 64mb ram will be one of the most regrettable things you could do. I could see 5.3 working with 64 megs but even my older Indigo needs 256mb ram to keep up with 6.5.8.
I would recommend you put at least 128 megs in the box before you try to do much with it.
Also, you will need an external cd drive to install Irix on the indy. Compared to the older non-ARCS PROM SGIs the Indy has an ARCS PROM so it should be happy with almost any scsi cd drive you feed it.

EDIT: You entered the command monitor yet (from either the PROM or from the Irix console) and typed hinv -v to see what exactly the complete specs are like? You better hope you got either the 24-bit color or 3D accelerated 24-bit video board. The 8-bit board is garbage.

 

[tingo]

Running an Indy on 6.5 and with 64mb ram will be one of the most regrettable things you could do. I could see 5.3 working with 64 megs but even my older Indigo needs 256mb ram to keep up with 6.5.8.

FWIW, it (64 Meg) seems to work nicely with Irix 6.2.

I would recommend you put at least 128 megs in the box before you try to do much with it.

Well, finding the right RAM modules isn't easy, at least not in this country.

Also, you will need an external cd drive to install Irix on the indy. Compared to the older non-ARCS PROM SGIs the Indy has an ARCS PROM so it should be happy with almost any scsi cd drive you feed it.

aha - good to know.

EDIT: You entered the command monitor yet (from either the PROM or from the Irix console) and typed hinv -v to see what exactly the complete specs are like? You better hope you got either the 24-bit color or 3D accelerated 24-bit video board. The 8-bit board is garbage.

Hey! don't talk down my XL8 graphics Indy!

Here's is hinv output from irix (transcribed):
Iris Audio Processor: version A2 revision 4.1.0
1 100 MHZ IP22 Processor
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revsion: 5.0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Data cache size: 16Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 16 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Vino video: unit 0, revision 0, IndyCam not connected
Integral ISDN: Basic Rate Interface unit 0, revision 1.0
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Integral SCSI contrtoller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Graphics board: Indy 8-bit

BTW, is there a way to get ssh onto my Indy, so that I can access it remetely?

 

[bear]

The only difference between the XL8 and XL24 is the amount of framebuffer memory. I resist your analysis that the XL24 can be good at the same time the XL8 is "garbage".

Plus it's not like we're talking about a Windows system here. IRIX has a completely serviceable dithering algorithm for 8bpp visuals.

 

[NeXT]

Well once you get the system setup you can search up Nekoware (essentially legacy SGI freeware) and I'm quite sure SSH applications exist.