Guest post by Firefox 3.0.19 is being beta tested on IRIX. Yeah, I know, Firefox 3.x is really old. But this is a big deal for IRIX users, who have been stuck on Firefox 2.0.22 for years. With this breakthrough, I expect to see 3.5 or 3.6 follow soon. Not sure how much more recent than that can be accomplished.
IRIX is and was awesome. Nekochan is the place you need to go if you happen to be lucky enough to have an SGI machine.
Just don’t bother with the IRC channel…
The IRC channel is terrible. I don’t even think Neko himself go there. I did once or twice and regretted it pretty fast.
Didn’t realize my news submission would be used verbatim or I’d have phrased it much more carefully.
The efforts of some Nekoware contributers particularly ‘dexter1’ and ‘diegel’ (among others) for over 3 years finally paid off in a functional 3.0.19 build using gcc 4.7 at the end of January. It is currently in beta testing before inclusion in nekoware/current.
That was pure speculation on my part regarding 3.5. The porting work on it was mostly done, but was running into some trouble like 3.0.x. I think it is highly likely that port is going to get new life now that 3.0.19 is fixed and running strong, but “expect” and “soon” might have been a bit strong.
I really wish I could say I had been involved in any of this porting work, but unfortunately for me I was not.
Edited 2013-02-14 23:07 UTC
this is really great news! recently i started to use firefox started from a remote machine by x11 forward. hopefully i can stop this now!
Are there still any active IRIX users? Wow… nice. I wonder what are the reasons? I never had I chance to use IRIX machine and would definitively like to try just for fun… but other than that – are there any “practical” reasons? As I understand “modern browser support” is not one of them
Come on, this is OSNews.
If there’s one thing that we expect from this site, it’s a bit of cheerleading for users of obscure and obsolete operating systems.
I think witold.bolt was being inquisitive, not malicious. The quotes around “practical” is a big hint.
I’ve used many fairly obscure and obsolete OSs and all of them had something different that made people tinker with it. I’ve never used IRIX, so I make the same question. What are the good and bad points of IRIX?
Cheerleading? come on … not only did they choose old and obsolete, closed-source platform that is a pure example of vendor-lockin model, but they also paid for it! could it be more ridiculous?
Edited 2013-02-18 09:27 UTC
I think he was just being curious and I will say I am too, I mean why would you want to put a decade plus IRIX system on the net? I mean I can see wanting to play with the OS for old times sake but what is the point of porting a really old version of FF to it?
it can’t be for security reasons, there have been too many releases since 3.x, not to mention I doubt seriously anybody is writing bugs for IRIX systems anymore. Can’t really be for features as its not like FF 3.x on MIPS is gonna be running flash or playing HTML V5, so why? why not just use whatever browser the last version of IRIX came with and call it a day?
There is an interesting, decade long thread on the topic over at http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=152
I still use IRIX as my preferred UNIX desktop environment. Even though the gui is dated in some respects, there are still a fair number of people who believe that the “IRIX Interactive Desktop” gui has the best balance of power and simplicity/consistency, particularly when compared with the constantly changing gadgets and distractions found in many of the open source desktops. Of course, as time goes on and newer systems outpace the older SGIs, I find that I use mine more and more as a glorified X11 terminal, rather than as a production system. On the other hand, while the later IRIX machines (Fuel, Tezro) may no longer be performance champs, they can do surprisingly well with pro-level animation and rendering software.
Also, people who are interested in learning about the principles of scaling apps across large, multi-cpu systems can find old 8, 16, 32 — and even larger — SGI systems for very little money. Maybe not practical for production, but very nice for learning about parallelization and app design.
You know, it’s like riding a mule, when everyone else is using car or jet. Although this comparison lacks ecological context, unfortunately
In my case, I rescued an SGI system in perfect operating condition from being thrown away. Many of them are/were marvels of industrial design in my opinion, and the idea of just throwing it away bothered me. Naturally once I had gone through the trouble of lugging it up six flights of stairs (this is an Indigo2, more luggable than some SGIs), it seemed silly not to turn the thing on for curiosity’s sake.
Once I had learned enough about IRIX and the hardware to get it on my network and install Konqueror (which was the most usable browser on IRIX at that time) I found I actually liked the IRIX desktop environment a lot. If there’s ever a stable 4Dwm clone for Linux, I would quite likely use it as my standard DE.
Of course they’re terribly out of date now, but still it’s surprising how much you can do with a system from ~1996.
Time to power on the old IRIS Indigo — actually, I doubt the Indigo has the horsepower to run it, maybe the Octane — and get to surfin’! Unfortunately I haven’t had the time to play with IRIX recently.
Because it’s so cool to work on old, clunky, outdated piece of code, like Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX OS …
Why not PDP-11? that would be even more retro. Custom OS, custom hardware. Yeah!