July 2003 Archives

A couple of interesting software contributions for today; Darwin Streaming Server 4.1.3 and Bump Scope 0.3.3, a nice XMMS visualization plugin.

Darwin Streaming Server, a feature packed streaming media server, was contributed by nvukovlj and comes in the form of a MIPS4 binary tarball. Information on Darwin Streaming Server can be found on the project web site. This is something I've been wanting to try out for quite some time and I'm very happy to see the latest version on IRIX.

Bump Scope 0.3.3, a visualization plugin for XMMS, was contributed by semi-fly and comes in the form of a MIPS3 tardist. It is, in the words of the original author, a "moving light embossing oscilloscope" and is pretty cool to see in action. Original source code is included in the tardist and is also available via the author's web site.

Download:

Bump Scope-0.3.3 (tardist) - 330KB

Thanks to the tips provided by syschuck in the forum, we now have an optimized MIPSpro 7.3.1.3m mips4 build of GNU Octave available for download. The binary is also APO enabled for multiprocessor environments.

GNU Octave is a MATLAB compatible high level language for numerical computations. More information can be found on the GNU Octave website.

Download:

GNU Octave 2.1.50-mips4 (tardist) - 33MB

I've received quite a few notes both in the forums and personally about the menu "bug" some are experiencing (date covering menu). This is a result of web browsers not automatically reloading the stylesheet after changes have been made. SHIFT+reload should take care of it.

If anyone knows some magic code to convince a browser to refresh the CSS automatically, please let me know.

A new version of the Stellarium tardist is now online which fixes the constellation/star position bug. Many thanks go to canavan for the fix!

I also sent an e-mail to Andreas so hopefully his page will be updated as well.

Mark Hellegers just announced the release of what looks like a fun and quite original application - LegoConstructionKit 0.2 for IRIX:

"Hi all,

Mark Hellegers"

FSV (File System Visualizer) is a open source 3D file system browser similar to SGI's classic FSN (File System Navigator) software. It's OpenGL based and should perform fairly well on just about any SGI machine running IRIX 6.5. In fact, the current FSV gallery screenshot was grabbed from my old Indigo R4K Elan system a couple of years ago!

Once upon a time there was an IRIX binary available straight from the developer, but since that's no longer available I built a new one. This tardist depends on GTK, GLIB, gtkglarea and gettext from SGI Freeware.

Download:

FSV-0.9-mips3 (tardist) - 580KB
FSV-0.9-mips4 (tardist) - 580KB

You may have read about Stellarium on Andreas Backhaus' excellent website Useful IRIX Software, but for those lacking development tools it may have been out of reach. This evening presented a perfect opportunity to properly package the software, including prereq checking and full source code.

Stellarium is based on OpenGL and does take advantage of texture RAM.

Detailed information on Stellarium can be found on the official web site.

The tardist package depends on SDL, aalib and nas from SGI's Freeware site.

Download:

stellarium-0.5.1-mips4 (tardist) - 6.4MB

RageX, a Nekochan forum regular, has created number of very nice Tezro inspired desktop backgrounds at various resolutions and added them to the Gallery. Be sure to check out his work here.

Instructions for using these backgrounds under 4Dwm can be found in the Custom Backgrounds On IRIX article.

Look for more additions to the Gallery soon. Perhaps we'll have some SIGGRAPH photos up in a couple weeks as well.

In a rather odd move, SGI subsidiary Alias|Wavefront has shortened their name to Alias:

"Alias|Wavefront, a Silicon Graphics, Inc. (NYSE: SGI) company, announced that today marks the start of its 20th anniversary celebrations and the launch of a corporate identity change from Alias|Wavefront to Alias. The name Alias signifies the rich heritage of the company and provides a simple yet powerful name that is well known throughout the 3D industry and beyond."

Read the full press release here.

Along with the Tezro/Onyx4 announcement, SGI also released Mozilla 1.4-final binaries on their Developer Central Open Source page.

Mozilla 1.4 is to be the final version in the current development branch; future Mozilla builds will instead be based on the Firebird browser code.

Tardist Download:

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

Today SGI has publicly announced the new Workstation Tezro and the new Visualisation system Onyx 4. With 4 R16K CPU's and VPro 12 GFX the Tezro is an impressive machine to be placed onto anyone's desk. And the Onyx 4 fits in right underneath...

Techdocs however are still not online yet.

Here's another gem contributed by squeen - Freeciv 1.14.0. Freeciv depends on several packages from SGI Freeware, however the tardist has been built to identify these prereqs.

What is it? "Freeciv is a multiplayer strategy game, released under the GNU General Public License. It is generally comparable with Civilization II�, published by Microprose."

More information on Freeciv can be found on the project web site.

Have fun!

Download:

Freeciv-1.14.0 (tardist) - 11.6MB

Note: I had problems getting the game to display properly until I installed the latest (beta) build of fw_pango. It will be included in the August Freeware distribution, but for now you can find it here:

ftp://shell.sgi.com/collect/freeware/fw_pango-1.0.5-sgipl1.tardist

For the adventurous solder guys and gals who like to take on the O2 overclocking trick from 180 to 200MHz found at gemm's place: I've managed to translate the article into english. I have Gemm's permission to do so, but didn't have his feedback yet from the translation, so it's still open for translation improvements...

Oh, and be careful out there. This comes with no warranty, and a phat disclaimer...

Here's another very cool announcement from (lisp) - an IRIX port of the popular OpenGL based Really Slick Screensavers suite.

From her Usenet post:

"http://www.thecommune.org.uk/~lisa/programs.schtml

--
(lisp) - http://www.thecommune.org.uk/~lisa -http://www.lisastoys.co.uk SBS#37(with oak leaf cluster) two#40 DOGMUK
Suzuki GS125ES
My other car's a cdr"

The patched source code is also available. These screensavers really live up to their name - be sure to check them out!

Thanks to the efforts of forum regular squeen, a tardist for GLAME-1.0.1 has been completed.

What is it? GLAME (GNU/Linux Audio Mechanics) is "a powerful, fast, stable and easily extensible sound editor" similar in function to Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge product. More information on the package can be found on the project's home page at http://glame.sourceforge.net.

There are quite a few SGI Freeware prereqs in this tardist (mostly GNOME related) but thankfully the tardist has been built to identify them.

Download:

glame-1.0.1a (tardist) - 2.3MB

Thanks to the continuing efforts of Brandon, a new version of IRIXDiVX released today! Version 0.96 brings several new features, bugfixes and speedups; full details are available in the changelog.

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

Direct download links:

IRIXDiVX 0.96 mips3/mips4 - 885KB

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.

Though not officially announced by SGI, a new techpub document has been posted detailing the next generation SGI workstation.

Some highlights include: a rack mountable chassis with the famous SGI cube logo, 1 to 4 R16K CPUs, 128MB VPro graphics with DVI-I output, PCI-X expansion slots, LVD SCSI, IDE DVD-ROM, NUMA-LINK, 5 DB9 serial ports, PS/2 keyboard & mouse, optional audio board, optional 4 port USB card, gigabit ethernet built in and an LCD status display.

More information will no doubt follow in the next few days.

Forum regular (lisp) recently released Encrusted, an OpenGL based clone of Bejeweled. From her Usenet announcement:

"Just a little OpenGL Bejewelled clone I knocked up:

--
(lisp) - http://www.thecommune.org.uk/~lisa - http://www.lisastoys.co.uk
SBS#37(with oak leaf cluster) two#40 DOGMUK
Suzuki GS125ES
My other car's a cdr"

I finally got the chance to try the game out and it's wonderful. Highly recommended!

The first big news item for July! As per expectations, SGI has posted up a new OpenOffice tardist on their software download page:

http://www.sgi.com/products/evaluation/6.5_ooo_1.0.3.1/

This version should resolve the installation caveats the previous binary tarballs shared. I won't be able to try it out myself until next week but will do so as soon as possible.

Thanks go to rob for the heads up on this release!