If you have any interest in SGI’s IRIX or used IRIX back when it was still current, you’re undoubtedly aware of Nekoware, a collection of freeware for IRIX, maintained and kept up-to-date as much as possible. After stagnating in 2015 and a few failed restarts and some infighting (apparently), the project finally relaunched somewhere last year, and a new quarterly release was pushed out.
Nekoware 2025Q4 is a clean break from previous releases, and requires that users fully remove any traces of previous installations. It contains the kinds of packages these freeware/open source collections for classic UNIX tended to contain: tons of common open source libraries, command-line tools, and more, including a few emulators. You’ll need IRIX 6.5.21 or newer, running on at least a MIPS R5000 processor-equipped SGI machine.
Planning for and work on the next release is already underway, and a brand new Nekoware SDK has been released as well, which provides bootstrap functionality and addresses the problem of having to build Nekoware on unstable IRIX environments. Seeing Nekoware resurrected is great news for the surprisingly active IRIX community.
As a HP-UX user, I feel some envy.
Requires MIPS IV unfortunately, so it will not work on my SGI Indy. Too bad.
There is also SGUG-RSE which, while incredibly poorly documented, I believe contains more software:
https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse