What is Nekoware?

Nekoware is a community project to create and offer a set of binary open source packages for MIPS4 SGI machines running IRIX6.5.21 or later.

Please be considerate while downloading; bandwidth is limited on the local mirror so please use an alternate when possible.


Current Public Mirrors


The SGI Freeware FAQ largely applies to Nekoware as well. In addition, some of the most frequently asked questions on the forum are provided below:

Q1.0: Why do I get BadMatch errors, Cairo errors, crashes, blue-on-blue text, etc.?

Many Linux systems use a single X visual and colormap for all windows by default; IRIX doesn't. As a result there are a variety of bugs lurking in the source code where programmers have, for example, allocated colors in the wrong colormap or assumed that all windows have the same depth. Try making your default X server visual 24-bit TrueColor by adding "-depth 24 -class TrueColor" to /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers. (Run xdpyinfo first to make sure your server supports this visual, and be sure to restart the X server after making a change. Logging out may not be enough!)

Q2.0: Why does Mozilla, GIMP, glib etc. crash with 'Memory fault' or 'failed to allocate xxxx bytes'?

Sometimes rqs recalculates the load addresses of some of the libraries in such a way that on load they happen to be mapped above the heap/BREAK. This usually goes unnoticed as the mapping is done at an address that's high in the virtual memory, well above any future memory allocations of the process. But when the process is memory demanding (e.g. mozilla, gimp &c.) or the map is very close to the initial BREAK, the mapped library is quickly reached and the memory allocator fails, hence the observed aborts and fatal traps.

To force rqsall to really do its best, do the following:

# As root:

cp /var/inst/.rqsfiles t

# Make sure 't' is not empty (ie, that you really did a copy).

rqsall -rescan -same_age -force -move -o t2 t

# Make sure 't2' is not empty.

cp t2 /var/inst/.rqsfiles

# .rqsfiles is now up to date, and DSOs moved.

(See the 'rqsall' man page for more info.)

Thanks go to chevarium for the explanation and David Anderson (davea) for the solution.