UNIX

Over the years, there have been a good number of decent RISC workstations: DEC, IBM, SGI, Sun and HP all had their time. Nowadays there's hardly any left - pretty much all of the large UNIX manufacturers' workstations have been discontinued. I still have mine though, and I like them too much to let go already.

Open source software offers a way to get decent, modern applications on an older machine: if you have the source, you can build it. But building every bit of software from source, tracking down dependencies, takes a lot of effort and time... or does it? Here's where pkgsrc comes into play. New quest unlocked: turn HPUX 11.11 in a desktop that is usable for day-to-day tasks.

So, you've finally got an SGI of your own. You kind of like the system, you want to contribute something to the IRIX community in general and more specifically to the community that helped you making your first steps in the IRIX world: Nekochan. You're okay with building apps from source, and you don't care about having to tweak a bit here and there to get stuff to run properly.

Well, IRIX packages - tardists - don't grow on trees. It all boils down to a number of SGI enthousiasts who build software on their machines in their free time, and package it up for the rest of the community to enjoy. Now, compiling an application on IRIX isn't that painful (yes, there are exceptions of course... OpenOffice, anyone?) but getting a decent tardist from it is a totally different cup of tea.