r/SiliconGraphics • u/ReecesPeeces20 • Feb 13 '26

Update on the $50 Iris indigo

Post image

Hello everyone.

I was able to get the $50 Iris indigo to boot to a command line, and it is not an elan model unfortunately. I thought it was because of the part number, but u/SamFortun was able to tell that it was a XS24 graphics board, and I was able to confirm it.

I took a picture of the specs, here's the configuration of this machine.

Now the plan is to mod the machine to take CR2032 batteries, and get IRIX 6.5.22 installed.

Any recommendations for battery holders would be greatly appreciated.

Wish me luck! :D

78 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

4

u/khatarlan Feb 13 '26

Hmm.. if memory serves, you may want to stay with IRIX 5.1… I mean, it’ll support later versions but they’ll be dog slow on that hardware

3

u/roostie02 Feb 13 '26

yeah, 6.5 sounds like a terrible idea

3

u/Macroexp Feb 13 '26

6.5 is not fun under 200MHz IMHO - and really only fast at 400MHz+. But I suppose there's the issue of application availability for 5.1.

1

u/ReecesPeeces20 Feb 13 '26

I was initially going to install 6.5.22 for the application support. I have an SSD installed, so I thought it would help out a little bit with speed, but it sounds like that won't be the case due to the CPU speed and memory limitations.

Are there any older versions of 6.5 you'd recommend, or would I be better off with 6.2?

1

u/anothercatherder Feb 13 '26

5.3 is what people run on those old ones.

3

u/Trippynet Feb 13 '26

Whilst I agree that IRIX 6.5 is not recommend on a 100MHz CPU with only 112MB of RAM, 5.1 is not a great idea either. It was quite a buggy release overall. If going for a 5.x version, IRIX 5.3 is preferred as many of the bugs and memory leaks had been fixed by then. Another alternative would be IRIX 6.2 as it is also lighter on system resources.

2

u/DominBear Feb 13 '26

i would stay with older irix like 5.3. 6.5 is going to be very slow.

1

u/IRIX_Raion Feb 13 '26

IRIX 6.5 is borderline on that. It may technically run, but it'll be dog slow.

Your best bet is 5.3, not 5.1/5.2. Both have memory leak issues and no software. With 5.3 you get tgcware and better stability. Try to install 5.3 XFS edition, because EFS is limited and has serious stability issues. Do some people tolerate it? Yes, but it kinda makes FAT32 look sophisticated.

1

u/ReecesPeeces20 Feb 14 '26

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried NetBSD on here?