April 2003 Archives

I'm working on the site layout at the moment, trying to fix some of the issues I've had in the past with the sidebar moving on it's own (it's now anchored properly). Huge thanks go to Slide for helping me out with the CSS necessary to get things in order here!

Note: If the website does not display correctly on Mozilla/Phoenix simply [shift]+click on the refresh button to force a load of the updated style sheet.

In other site news - mis, one of our forum/chat regulars, has been hard at work creating SGI themed desktop backgrounds in LightWave and adding them to the Gallery. You can check out his work here.

SGI related news has been very light; other than the release of OpenOffice at the start of April, this has been one fairly uninteresting month. Hopefully things will pick up soon.

Following closely on the heels of the official May 2003 Freeware release, freeware betas are gathering once again at http://freeware.sgi.com/beta.

New this week:

fw_openssh-3.6.1p1
fw_openssl-0.9.6j

And as mentioned earlier:

fw_samba-2.2.8a

For those running IRIX versions below 6.5.19, this 3.6.1p1 beta build of OpenSSH does not require the presence of /dev/random.

Michael Theodoulou has completed a binary installer package for the IRIX version of OpenOffice 1.0.1; see this Usenet thread for details. Many thanks go to Michael for his efforts in putting this together and sharing it with the IRIX community.

A few notes:

1. The current archive is mips-4 only.

2. You must set the DISPLAY environment variable prior to installation, i.e.:

setenv DISPLAY koyori:0.0

Failure to set this variable will cause the installer to freeze during the copying phase and subsequent lauches of the installed application will also fail. Adding the environment variable to the shell startup file is the best long term solution.

3. Execute the 'setup' program from the installation directory, choose 'Standard Installation' and click Ignore for any files the installer claims are missing.

4. Start OpenOffice via ./soffice in the destination directory.

Additional IRIX specific installation instructions can be found here.

General information on OpenOffice can be found at the official web site:

http://www.openoffice.org

Download:

OpenOffice 1.0.1 IRIX (76.9MB)

SGI has posted a new tardist for Samba 2.2.8a on their Beta Freeware site. This release addresses a security concern which can lead to an anonymous user gaining root access on a Samba serving system. All versions of Samba up to and including Samba 2.2.8 are vulnerable. An active exploit of the bug has been reported in the wild, so if you use Samba you should upgrade immediately.

More information can be found on the Samba.org web site.

SGI Build:

http://freeware.sgi.com/beta/fw_samba-2.2.8a.tardist

Samba.org Build:

http://us2.samba.org/samba/ftp/Binary_Packages/IRIX/samba65.2.2.8a.tardist

SGI has posted the new Mozilla 1.4a binaries on their Developer Central Open Source page.

Download:

ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/mozilla/download/irix/1.4a/fw_mozilla.tardist

Note that as of today the tardist is a bit strange in that it is gzip compressed ... just rename it to something like fw_mozilla.tar.gz and then decompress if you are unable to install it normally. I expect this will be fixed by SGI shortly.

SGI has posted the May 2003 Freeware archive online. You can check it out at the usual place: http://freeware.sgi.com.

New version of IRIXDiVX released today! Version 0.95 adds several new features; a nice new popup option menu (right click in display area) plus a new tardist package with icons, a spot in the iconcatalog, and a manpage. Full details are available in the changelog.

Check out the IRIXDiVX Home Page for complete list of changes, features and additional info.

Thanks again to Brandon for writing with the info and releasing the software to the public.

Direct download links:

IRIXDiVX 0.95 mips3/mips4 - 761KB

AC3 Test - Sample DiVX AVI File (320 x 180) 481KB
Colorbar - Sample to test colorspace (160 x 160) 14KB. It should be red on top, green in the middle, and blue on the bottom.

I noticed yesterday afternoon that the TinderBox builds of the IRIX OpenOffice OOO_STABLE_1 tree are showing green (Build and all tests were successful). Apparently there were some minor problems even after the initial stable release announcement, but those issues have been resolved.

http://ooo.ximian.com/tinderbox/OOO_STABLE_1/status.html

Still no word on an installable binary package though; apparently TinderBox builds are just verification builds on remote machines to prove it can be done ... they don't seem to be offered as 'nightly' binaries ala the Mozilla Project.