Taking a stab at IRIX porting; looking for a shell ...

[jpstewart]

Don't encourage him that much or we never get newish firefox on IRIX

"People achieve the best results not knowing something is difficult or even impossible"...

Cheers

It's not my intention to be negative or discouraging.

I find having realistic expectations about the time required helps me immensely. If I go in thinking something will be a quick and easy task, I'll very quickly get discouraged if it's not. If I know it's going to be difficult, I'm more apt to slog through just for the sense of accomplishment that comes at the end.

I prefer the quote, "to be forewarned is to be forearmed". Better to prepared for the hard work than surprised by it!

[NCommander]

Don't encourage him that much or we never get newish firefox on IRIX

"People achieve the best results not knowing something is difficult or even impossible"...

Cheers

It's not my intention to be negative or discouraging.

I find having realistic expectations about the time required helps me immensely. If I go in thinking something will be a quick and easy task, I'll very quickly get discouraged if it's not. If I know it's going to be difficult, I'm more apt to slog through just for the sense of accomplishment that comes at the end.

I prefer the quote, "to be forewarned is to be forearmed". Better to prepared for the hard work than surprised by it!

Well, from looking at previous patches, getting Firefox to compile itself isn't the hard part (there was a successful build of 3.5); the problem is bitrot. Part of it I bet is that Firefox on MIPS seems to only really get regularly compiled for little-endian chips (Loongson mostly) and on Linux, so some of the IRIX assembler code has probably broken. My initial effort is to build libnspr, and make sure its test suite passes; this confirms issues with sockets, threads, and other low-level plumbing is Ok. Then the next issue is checking libnss (not expecting issues here), and then XPI where I expect build-related error message confetti. Once the entire thing builds, then its a matter of checking the irix assembler code in the tree, and make sure it still matches reality.

I was hoping the cray-cyber o2000 would have been online today so I could start working, but its remained off, and I have gotten no reply to an email I sent as of yet. I'll probably be waiting for at least two more weeks until I can get my hands on SGI hardware. Still hoping someone with a box is willing to give me a shell .

[josehill]

Still hoping someone with a box is willing to give me a shell .

I suspect that it is just a matter of time. Don't give up hope!

[rwengerter]

If you are really interested in Irix and sgi workstations you should buy one. One forum member with the name
"Richtom1" collected 8 years sgi workstations, is now retired and wants to sell all his sgi workstations.
He had more than 10 sgi workstations and I guess he still has several sgi workstations for sale. He
lives in Florida and prefers personal pick up. More in the thread about it:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16723960

[NCommander]

If you are really interested in Irix and sgi workstations you should buy one. One forum member with the name
"Richtom1" collected 8 years sgi workstations, is now retired and wants to sell all his sgi workstations.
He had more than 10 sgi workstations and I guess he still has several sgi workstations for sale. He
lives in Florida and prefers personal pick up. More in the thread about it:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=16723960

I will likely pick up a box once I return to Portland, but I don't know for sure when that might be ...

[recondas]

I will likely pick up a box once I return to Portland, but I don't know for sure when that might be ...

A nekochan member in the NYC area has a dual processor O300 listed in the For Sale Forum. It'd make a very competent IRIX dev box, and when ever you head back west you could always pass it along to someone else there on the east coast or even ship it to Portland. Coast to coast shipping something the size/weight of an O300 should run less than $50.

[kubatyszko]

Meanwhile, I've temporarily set up an O200 with dual 360 R12K, 1.5G RAM in Tokyo for NCommander with fresh install of everything he needs for the firefox.

Cheers

[smj]

Thank you kubatyszko - I keep getting new high priority tasks pushed onto the stack.

[hamei]

... I want to make a contribution in attempting to port Firefox to IRIX; I have a fair bit of experience digging through that codebase, and getting C++ to build with non-gcc compilers (combined with an old hobby of reviving old operating systems).

Here's a slightly different, maybe more feasible (maybe less feasible ?) idea ... Recent events have convinced me that Firefox 3+ is a pos. A database to keep track of bookmarks ? They are effing nuts. Certifiably insane, a bunch of liars, megalomaniacs and Minamata survivors. To hell with them.

Firefox 2 already works on Irix. Other than crashing a lot and not being so fast, why not re-start the Original (tm) Phoenix project ? Firefox now is just as big a piece of crap as Mozilla ever was. Maybe more. How about, for now, taking FFlop 2 and stripping out the garbage and fixing the memory leaks instead of spending a lot of effort making a humongous kluge run on 600 mhz hardware ? Fork this hummer, from a time when it still had a future. Good idea ?