when Ritsuko times out

If you’ve been running Statpress on your blogs, you might have noticed this weirdo machine pop up that Statpress claims is Linux:


If you’ve been putting 2 and 2 together, you’d realize that’s actually me. The first one being Netscape, the second one being Seamonkey 1.1.14, which did justice to your CSS.

-bash-3.2$ uname -a
IRIX64 hulda 6.5 10070055 IP30
Or more precisely:
1 300 MHZ IP30 Processor
CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.3
FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 0.0
Main memory size: 1024 Mbytes
Xbow ASIC: Revision 1.3
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 2 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
Integral SCSI controller 1: Version QL1040B (rev. 2), single ended
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty1
IOC3/IOC4 serial port: tty2
IOC3 parallel port: plp1
Graphics board: ESI
Integral Fast Ethernet: ef0, version 1, pci 2
Iris Audio Processor: version RAD revision 12.0, number 1
I’ve been setting up and using this baby for a day now, and I must say, it lives up to the hype. Partially. You see, it’s still UNIX, so it does suffer from inconsistencies, especially in the Network setup part of System Manager. But the Nekochan Wiki is always there to help, and invariably in a more techy way, so it doesn’t really matter. I’m still trying to find a use for this machine, though… other than bragging about it.

The part about this feeling fast sure was true, though. You would never have guessed that this was a single processor 300MHz machine. GNOME and KDE always made my x86 systems feel slower than in Windows, but this one takes it to a whole new level. I’d say it’s right up there with BeOS in terms of response. Very responsive, stuff like Seamonkey (a pretty heavy app) starts up in 2-3 seconds (would take 6-10 secs on a P3 running Linux). You have to use it to believe it. Oh, and it’s stable too. The OS also never freezes while it tries to access a disk/remote share, like every Windows.

Then you use Seamonkey. Oh gawd, it’s slow. Slow as molasses. Performs just as badly as it did on my 675MHz Celeron running Linux with 384MB RAM at home, except it lags more often, and longer. Unfortunately, it’s not like there’s a choice. I’m told Firefox isn’t any better (Firefox lags too on my 675MHz Celeron), and there isn’t a WebKit based browser for IRIX. I would install the SGI Freeware Mozilla 1.6, which is supposed to be just as responsive as the rest of the system, but I’m afraid the libraries required would conflict with my nekoware libraries. EDIT: it’s not any better. I tried Firefox, it’s just as slow. It seems to be a Gecko tradition. Solution: switching Seamonkey’s theme to Classic (making it look like good old Netscape) makes it perform 20-30% faster. It still freezes up while rendering, but once it’s rendered the page, it’s very usable. For time-critical web browsing, dillo is fucking amazing. What an incredibly fast browser… if only it supported CSS.

Netscape 4.79 is included, and since SGI had a hand in porting it over, it runs really fast and responsive. Even better than when I was using it back in 1999. However, there are some major problems with using Netscape on today’s internet. Pages that use a lot of CSS are just stone broken, while others which use Javascript work somewhat.

I guess I’ll just use it for Blender and Maya. And typing this post up.

EDIT2: It dates from August 4th, 1999, if a yellow sticker behind the front panel is to be believed.