Tips & Tricks

Software

Application

Gnome Applications Crash

Depending on the version of the software and libraries some applications dump core with a message similar to Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes). While this message doesn't say anything about resolutions or color depths it is related to that. To fix it follow the description above and set color depth to 24bit.

Printing on SGI

A good open source solution is CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System. It is a full replacement to BSD / SystemV printing services, has builtin Postscript support, can print data to a device or network connection. It works well with recent SAMBA versions to offer print services to Windows clients.

Open Office Installation

This part is quite outdated since the last Open Office port to IRIX was Open Office 1.0.3 in 2003.

Basically it is essential to read the documentation given on www.openoffice.org. Unless you want to run OpenOffice as root only (which is not recommended) you should follow the instructions for a network install closely.

From the directory created by extracting the software from the tarball you should run the install script in interactive mode (as root). This will automatically invoke the setup program to perform a network installation on your computer. After successfully completing that installation (you may ignore the error on the missing README file) log in as a user and run the setup program from the directory you have installed OpenOffice to. This will copy a couple of files to your home directory and should leave you with a working OpenOffice installation. Have fun with it, it's nice to have a working (and free!) office package for IRIX.

Note that probably by now Open Office is also available from the official site as a binary distribution (tardist format is also announced): http://porting.openoffice.org/irix/ The situation is even better now: The software pages of the SGI website have a binary - so check it out! :)