> I can't tell you how happy I'll be when I can get rid of the SGI O2's > and Origin's in the IMA! just leave them on a certain loading dock at a certain time of the early morning, and I'm sure it can be arranged that you don't see them again. :) as for Irix, after playing with it for a few hours, my thoughts so far are: pro: - scales *really* well. (the aforementioned 1024-processor box...) - has some decent idiot tools for administration - has really amazing graphics stuff built on top of it - 'inst' actually looks like a halfway decent package manager. - has a Logical Volume Manager (no idea how it compares to linux LVM) con: - security is a secondary concern. the fact that system accounts are shipped by default with no password, just means that it's intended for knowlegeable administrators who change all these things before installing the machine on the network. the fact that when you create accounts (at least with the GUI tool), the default is to make them passwordless (no password needed to access), is awfully dubious. does TrustedIRIX do this differently by default? also, it doesn't ship with SSH. - user command line tools are horribly neglected. AFAIK, no shell that it ships with, has command completion (certainly not by default). decisions like this are what has given UNIX and the command-line a bad name. the GNU command-line utils blow these (and any other commercial UNIX's) out of the water. - filesystem standard, like most commercial unices (unixii?), has grown organically over the years, and is not well-organized. IMHO, Irix's layout is cruftier than most. ideas like '/usr/freeware' and '/usr/people/' are just wrong. one of the things that I *really* liked about linux when I first saw it; was how reasonably-organized the filesystem layout was. - a simple installation of it, takes up nearly 800MB. that's GUI, compiler, and a lot of user tools. - (more of a hardware issue) that fancy graphics hardware does *so much* in hardware, that flexibility is compromised. a single graphics 'pipe' (which may be multiple monitors) is limited to 8 million pixels in its framebuffer; and no more than 3840 pixels in any one direction (horizontal or vertical). my desktop at home is wider than that (4320 pixels); and IBM now has a single monitor that requires a graphics card capable of 9.2 million pixels. I know my biases show here (certainly based on the quantity of cons vs. pros); but I would like to say that I don't see anything fundamentally *wrong* with the Irix kernel itself (at least not yet); it's just that the tools associated with it, require much more effort to get work done, than the tools usually associated with the Linux kernel. also, I'd like to point out that whatever the shortcomings of the OS are; the hardware is *really kickass*. I've got an Indigo2 on the desk at work next to me; and even though it was built in 1993, it blows away most boxes I ever touched all the way up to 1999. having seen the 1024-processor Origin in SGI's basement (thanks guys!); I'm truly amazed at it. I think that possibly by Linux 2.6, we may be able to boot Linux on 1024 processors. I doubt that it will scale as well as Irix tho. maybe by the next stable release, we'll have something that comes close, tho. (I think HP's pluggable scheduler technology for Linux will make this a lot easier). of course, by that time (~4 years at the current pace of things) we'll be able to build a 1024-proc box in our basements, with off-the-shelf PC technology (see the recent slashdot article on high-speed interconnect technology). :) Carl Soderstrom -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises (952) 943-8700