HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: ercolessi@uimrl3.mrl.uiuc.edu (furio ercolessi)
Subject: Re: Frustrated with SGI support..
Reply-To: ercolessi@uimrl3.mrl.uiuc.edu (furio ercolessi)
Organization: MRL - UIUC
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 22:43:51 GMT

In article <1993Jan1.173056.23814@arbi.Informatik.Uni-Oldenburg.DE>,
Thomas.Weihrich@arbi.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de (Thomas Weihrich) writes:
|>So I phoned SGI Germany - their service center in Cologne, to be
|>specific.
|>The lady on the phone's first action was to ask me for my maintenance
|>contract #. I told her that I did not have a maintenance contract, since
|>I could not afford it (I am a student). She said: if you don't have a
|>maintenance contract, we won't sell you anything - no spares, no
|>upgrades. I told her that I only wanted to buy an upgrade (the 1.2 GR
|>chip to be specific). She said: no way and hung up the phone. 

Just a few thoughts for the folks at SGI's marketing. 

I think that with the Indigos and all the massive effort spent in their
video&audio , SGI is entering a new era.  the machines are very
attractive for home and are serious competitors of high-end PC's
and Macs.  in fact, we all know they are much better! 

but i have the impression that SGI is rather slow in understanding
that this is a different market than academy or industry. on one
side, they want to enter this market (as shown by the ads on Byte, for
instance), but on the other hand, the maintainance policy seems
to discourage the folks willing to take one at home.
at this point, such people are likely to be students or professional
who already used SGIs at work.

the situation is particularly dramatic in europe!
i am now in the US, and will be back in Italy in one year, and
I am *very* tempted to carry an Indigo with me  (of course, there
is no way I could buy one in Italy, far too expensive).
BUT, I know what the support is in Italy (similar to Germany, it seems), 
and I know I will be into financial troubles pretty soon.  So i am
still holding my purchase decision.  

SGI: don't you think that encouraging the home buyers would be
a right thing to do at this stage?   
European branches of SGI (if you are listening...): don't you think that 
if you reduce prices and start being friendly with the home users, 
the increase in sales can be sufficient to increase your revenue, even 
if the revenue per machine sold is less? 
--
Furio Ercolessi
Materials Research Laboratory           |   Intl School for Advanced Studies
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign   |   Trieste, Italy
furio@uiuc.edu                          |   furio@sissa.it
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
From: ajp2o@medicine.rochester.edu (Anthony Persechini)
Subject: mounting cdrom drive on PC
Keywords: PC, cdrom
Reply-To: ajp2o@medicine.rochester.edu
Organization: University of Rochester
Distribution: usa
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 16:14:47 GMT

I would like to attach a cdrom drive to my SGI machine and be able to mount it
on my PC using idrive, an nfs-like program that runs on top of FTP software's
kernel.

Is this possible?

---
Anthony Persechini
Assistant Professor
University of Rochester School of Medicine
ajp2o@crocus.medicine.rochester.edu
From: soubyran@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Soubyran Richard)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: ZModem
Date: 28 Dec 92 19:51:45 GMT
Organization: Universite de Montreal


Hello sgiers!

I have avery weird problem... When I am using zmodem (sz) to
transfer files between my Mac and the Indigo, the transfer hangs
and quit when there is only 6 seconds left in the transfer. This
problem exist only since we have changed the OS last summer. We
were running version 3 of IRIX back then. a few weeks ago, we
changed to IRIX 4.0.5 and now the transfer hangs just at 3 seconds
from the end... That's VERY strange...

Before upgrading to IRIX 3 something, everything was fine! When I
use Kermit, no problems at all... The tech support at our
university is no good at all...

	"We don't know what's wrong." 
	"We do not have that problem here in the office"
	etc

is all they can say.

One more thing... this problem occurs only if the file is big
enough to make the transfer go over 60 seconds. Any file less than
that... no problems...

Please help!

Richard Soubyran
soubyran@alize.ere.umontreal.ca
From: mark@sidefx.uucp (Mark Elendt)
Subject: winopen() with no graphics
Summary: Is it possible to find out whether you can make graphics calls?
Keywords: getgdesc winopen
Organization: Side Effects Software Inc.
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 19:12:02 GMT

If you have no graphics console and you try to do a winopen(), the
call doesn't fail, it actually terminates your process or hangs.
Apparently, there is no getgdesc() call to determine whether it is
possible to do a winopen() safely.

If there is no one logged on to a machine:

	getgdesc(GD_NSCRNS)	== 1
	getgdesc(GD_SCRNTYPE)	== GD_SCRNTYPE_WM
	getgdesc(GD_WSYS)	== GD_WSYS_4S

Nothing to indicate that a winopen() will terminate or hang.

Of course this problem really crops up if an application is run from
a dumb terminal or run at night after everyone has logged out.

Sometimes, the graphics are nice if the user is using an application
interactively, but not necessary if the application is run in batch
mode.  Occasionally, the user leaves options on for the interactive
graphics when doing batch runs and it would be nice if the program
didn't terminate on them.

Any ideas?

___________________________________________________________________
Mark Elendt				Side Effects Software Inc.,
UUCP:	  mark@sidefx.uucp		Toronto, Ontario Canada
Internet: sidefx!mark@canrem.com	(416) 366-4607
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
From: suh@rainbow.dcrt.nih.gov (Edward Suh)
Subject: Decompressing a file with -tz
Reply-To: suh@rainbow.dcrt.nih.gov
Organization: National Institutes of Health
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 17:38:10 GMT

Could someone tell me how to decompress a file with -tz
extension?

----------------------------------------------------------
Edward B. Suh			Phone: (301) 402-3045
Bldg. 12A, Rm. 2021		Internet: suh@alw.nih.gov
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, MD 20892
From: karron@karron.med.nyu.edu (Dan Karron (karron@nyu.edu))
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: sh/csh/tcsh and TMPDIR
Date: 3 Jan 93 23:08:22 GMT


How can I get the various shell commands to respect the value
in TMPDIR ?

sh keeps clogging up /tmp/ with
sh$PID temp files.

I prefer to use a private temp disk.

I have some scripts that sweep out the tmp dir's.

It would be nicer if sh <<heredoc
theredoc
heredoc

would put tmp files where I would expect it.

What about the tmpname (spelling?) system call ?
Cheers!

Dan.
| karron@nyu.edu (e-mail alias )         Dan Karron, Ph.D.,Research Associate|
| Phone: 212 263 5210 Fax: 212 263 7190  New York University Medical Center  |
| 560 First Avenue                       Digital Pager  <1>  212 397 9330    |
| New York, New York 10016               <2> 10896   <3> <your-number-here>  |
``ALMOST Done writing, back to doing it again!.''
From: vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: UUCP over SLIP?
Date: 23 Dec 92 04:08:33 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.  Mountain View, CA

In article <Bzorqn.1y2@accelr8.com>, jim@accelr8.com (Jim Reiss) writes:
> We use a modem on a 4D/20 running IRIX 4.0.1 to dial up an internet
> provider with UUCP.  At times, we also call that site with SLIP.
> I would like the ability to run uucico over the SLIP connection when
> the modem is being used for that.  Does this seem possible?
> I know that UUCP can be done over TCP/IP, but SGI does not seem to
> provide any Devices file entry for it, and I am not sure how to set
> up the Systems file for such a thing either.  Can anyone help or direct
> me to information about this sort of thing?  Thanks.


The current version of UUCP shipped by Silicon Graphics does not
include UUCP over TCP/IP.   The necessary code exists and I hope it
will be shipped in the next major release.  If it is sufficiently
important you to have it sooner, then make your needs known to whomever
sells IRIS's to you.


Vernon Schryver,  vjs@sgi.com
From: mas@everest.esd.sgi.com (Michael Schulman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: Finite element modeling/analysis
Date: 30 Dec 92 21:05:56 GMT
Reply-To: mas@sgi.com
Organization: Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA

In article <34837@adm.brl.mil>, john@sg25.aud.temple.edu (John W. Schwegler) writes:
|> From: john@sg25.aud.temple.edu (John W. Schwegler)
|> Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
|> Subject: Finite element modeling/analysis
|> Date: Wed, 30 Dec 92 11:11:22 PDT
|> Lines: 21
|> 
|> 
|> Happy New Year Folks!
|> 
|> I am about to start working on a problem that would probably be handled
|> well by finite element modeling, computation of an electrostatic solution
|> in a complex geometry with (assumed) known sources.
|> 
|> Does anyone have any suggestions about FE software for SGI machines?
|> Public domain would be nice, but rather unlikely I suppose. I am
|> interested in hearing about any commercial packages as well.
|> 
|> Thanks in advance!
|> 

All of the major FEA codes run on SGI.  Many of them are parallelized on our
Power Series as well.  Dyna3D is a public domain FEA code from Lawrence
Livermore National Labs.  To get a complete listing of FEA codes consult
your ( or your nearest sales persons ) 1992 IRIS Partner Catalog, pages
343-386.

-- 

Michael Schulman
Manager, Technical Marketing
Engineering & Scientific Applications

Silicon Graphics Computer Systems
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94039
415-390-3308

mas@sgi.com
From: ns14@crux3.crux2.cit.cornell.edu (Nathan Otto Siemers)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: imgworks don't
Date: 19 Dec 92 18:40:58 GMT
Organization: Department of Chemistry, Cornell Univ.

>>>>> On 19 Dec 92 00:13:10 GMT, karron@karron.med.nyu.edu (Dan Karron (karron@nyu.edu)) said:


 Dan> If I read in a very large .tiff file from our handy dandy mac
 Dan> scanner, I need to crop it down for a display that will fit the
 Dan> screen.  This involves shrinking the image 50%, and cropping
 Dan> from the top and the bottom.

 Dan> To remove from the top, take pixels from the bottom. And versa
 Dan> visa...(sp?)

 Dan> I use the sgi save format, and it reverses things yet again. I
 Dan> can make only symmetrical crops from the top and bottom to get
 Dan> things almost ok.

 Dan> Is this a known problem (I am running 4.0.2 on an Indigo) ?
 Dan> When will we have some kind of overlay box outline cropping
 Dan> facility ?  I do like the numeric entry for creating nice,
 Dan> symmetrical, even sized images. However, I spend a lot of time
 Dan> guessing at the numbers to get things to come out ok. I have to
 Dan> guess a lot because what the numbers do is not what you would
 Dan> expect from the gizmos!

	Numeric entry is not an option, but I heartily reccomend xv
for many of the image manipulation tasks you may need to do.  It is a
fantastic program, but I am not sure if it is capable of more than 8
bit color.  (i think it is)   It is also free.

Nathan Siemers.

--
--
/  | / /__|  /  /---/ /__| /  | /    nathan@chemres.tn.cornell.edu
From: isaac@elrond.physics.mcgill.ca (Martin-D. Lacasse)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: nlist and pre/post IRIX 4.0.5
Date: 23 Dec 92 20:32:44 GMT
Reply-To: isaac@physics.mcgill.ca
Organization: Center for the Physics of Materials, McGill University


	It looks like IRIX 4.0.5 nlist() now returns n_type if found and
	0 if not instead of the pre-4.0.5 IRIX versions which were
	returning n_type + 1 if found and n_type otherwise.

	If this is the case, how can I tell the pre-compiler to
	make the distinction?

---
 Martin-D. Lacasse                   internet: isaac@physics.mcgill.ca
 Physics Department                     voice: (514) 398-7027
 McGill University                        fax: (514) 398-8434
 Montreal
 Quebec, Canada
 &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
From: jhp@photon.com (Jim Patterson)
Subject: Re: Where does the CPU go, when its not doing nuthin' (gr_osview)
Reply-To: jhp@photon.com
Organization: Photon Research Associates, Inc.
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 1992 00:02:57 GMT

: I have been running a structural analysis finite element code on a 4d35 with 
: similar problems.  I was the only user on the machine but could get no more 
: than about 60% of the CPU.  I too attributed this to disk accesses but when 
: we upgraded our memory from 16mb to 48mb, I found that I could get about 95% 
: of the CPU!
: I wonder if Dave Olson could explain that?

Your process was too big for physical memory, so it was doing a lot of
swapping to disk.  Once you got enough memory you didn't need to swap
and the disk access went away (and the process worked a lot faster)

Jim


-- 
James Patterson	             photon!jhp@ucsd.edu      jhp@photon.com
Photon Research Associates   619-455-9741 (voice)     619-546-3903 (fax)
"... three great virtues of a programmer: laziness,impatience and hubris "
     Larry Wall in _Programming Perl_
From: pjf@osiris.cs.uoguelph.ca (Peter Jaspers-Fayer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: a2ps & xpsview (xpsview & landscape)
Date: 29 Dec 92 18:38:21 GMT

We love a2ps.  It produces nice postscript from plain ascii or man pages.
With a duplex-capable printer, you can get 4 page images on one sheet of
paper.  Sometimes, I want to preview the output on my SGI screen, and so I
use xpsview.  Now the xpsview man page mentions "-la", but all that does
is change the size of the window.  Short of editing the postscript, is
there a way to get xpsview to rotate the image so I don't get this
terrible crick in my neck?
-- 
 /PJ      "You can't grep dead trees"             pjf@osiris.cs.uoguelph.ca
                                                         pjf@vm.uoguelph.ca
     CRT emissions are physically addictive. (Shh!)      (519)824-4120x6309
From: olson@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Dave Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re:  SCSI printers
Date: 21 Dec 92 20:50:56 GMT

|  Does anyone have experience with connecting a ps printer to SGI
|  boxes via the SCSI {1,2} bus ?
|  
|  I have a zippy Xante ps printer. It is quite fast, and I have
|  it connected via a centronics port. I have a breakout box on the
|  line, and I see lots of handshake activity. I think that the
|  printer is out pacing the parallel port on large bitmap images.
|  The printer ready line is can be trapped with no data on the data lines.

You don't say what kind of SGI system it is.  If it is a 30,35, or Indigo,
the parallel port defaults to about 200KB/sec (most printers only seem
to go about 60-70, and we wanted to be conservative).  By running
a small program on the port, you can do an ioctl that will take it up
to 500KB/sec, and still be within the psuedo spec.  You can go even
further, and run up to 1.5 MB/sec, if the printer handles it.

|  This wonderprinter has a SCSI port, and is designed for direct connection
|  to Apple machines. 

Usually the SCSI port is intended for a disk drive for fonts, although
there are a few SCSI printers that take data through the SCSI port
(Kodak 7700 is one we support, and the Laserwriter 1 had a twin that
was designed for printing bitmaps, with no PS interpreter; there is
a sample program in 4Dgifts/examples/devices/devscsi to drive that
printer).

|  Any insight about connecting this to a IRIS ? 
|  
|  What is the max throughput on the parallel lines ?

See above for Indigo class.  For the 20 and 25, it was around
250KB/sec, as I recall, and the IKON vme board was somewhere around
100-200, but I'm really hazy on that.

|  What is the bottleneck in getting data out a parallel line ?

Almost always the printer.

|  The CPU wait line shows lots of physical io waiting, like the
|  whole CPU wait bar is light blue (whatever that means!).

It just means that while sitting in the idle loop, there were
processes that would be runnable if they weren't waiting for i/o
to complete.

|  What is the throughput on the SCSI 1 or SCSI2 bus ? What are the
|  bottlenecks there ?

All kinds of variation here; I'd need to know what machine and/or i/o
board you have (hinv output).  Again, it is usually target device
limited.

|  Would it pay to write/debug a SCSI driver for this beast ? Is there 
|  lp scripts that talk/listen to the SCSI port ? What are the
|  issues to connect a program to a SCSI port ? Kernel drivers ?
|  I don't know if the printer will try to converse with the host
|  via the SCSI port.

You would almost certainly use the pass through SCSI driver (devscsi,
aka 'man ds dslib').  That is what we use for scanners and printers
on the SCSI bus..

Let no one tell me that silence gives consent,  |   Dave Olson
because whoever is silent dissents.             |   Silicon Graphics, Inc.
    Maria Isabel Barreno                        |   olson@sgi.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
From: eng10312@nusunix1.nus.sg (NEO LIN CHEN)
Subject: Re: Frustrated with SGI support..
Organization: National University of Singapore
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 02:50:34 GMT
From: karron@karron.med.nyu.edu (Dan Karron (karron@nyu.edu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: SCSI printers
Date: 21 Dec 92 10:54:47 GMT


Does anyone have experience with connecting a ps printer to SGI
boxes via the SCSI {1,2} bus ?

I have a zippy Xante ps printer. It is quite fast, and I have
it connected via a centronics port. I have a breakout box on the
line, and I see lots of handshake activity. I think that the
printer is out pacing the parallel port on large bitmap images.
The printer ready line is can be trapped with no data on the data lines.

This wonderprinter has a SCSI port, and is designed for direct connection
to Apple machines. 

Any insight about connecting this to a IRIS ? 

What is the max throughput on the parallel lines ?
What is the bottleneck in getting data out a parallel line ?
The CPU wait line shows lots of physical io waiting, like the
whole CPU wait bar is light blue (whatever that means!).

What is the throughput on the SCSI 1 or SCSI2 bus ? What are the
bottlenecks there ?

Would it pay to write/debug a SCSI driver for this beast ? Is there 
lp scripts that talk/listen to the SCSI port ? What are the
issues to connect a program to a SCSI port ? Kernel drivers ?
I don't know if the printer will try to converse with the host
via the SCSI port.

Cheers!

Dan.
| karron@nyu.edu (e-mail alias )         Dan Karron, Research Associate      |
| Phone: 212 263 5210 Fax: 212 263 7190  New York University Medical Center  |
| 560 First Avenue                       Digital Pager  <1>  212 397 9330    |
| New York, New York 10016               <2> 10896   <3> <your-number-here>  |
``Too busy doing to write about it, too busy writing to do anything about it.''

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
From: halazar@media.mit.edu (Michael Halle)
Subject: improving window startup time in 4Dwm
Organization: M.I.T. Media Laboratory
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 19:43:58 GMT


4Dwm, and mwm before it, by default execs your $SHELL shell to start up
all exec'ed applications in your .4Dwmrc/.mwmrc .  OSF/Motif did this
in version 1.0, and there was no way to change it other than feeding it
an altered $SHELL.

To me, this was a really dumb default; /bin/sh would have been a much
more sensible choice.  The more heavyweight shells take longer to
start up, so all applications (including "Do you really want to 
log out now?") take at least shell startup time to start.

Shells such as csh and tcsh also produce the "[1] 1023" messages in
your console window every time an application is started from a menu.

Not to mention the fact that it is impossible to put any shell commands
in you wm startup files, because who knows what shell a user is running.

Luckily, the environment variable MWMSHELL was added in the second 
release of Motif, and is available in 4Dwm.  I heartily recommend
adding "MWMSHELL=/bin/sh; export MWMSHELL" to your Xsession file
before the window manager is started.  

To notice the improvment, log out, log back in again, and log out. 
See how the dialog box comes up pleasingly fast the second time.
The smallest things make computers seem faster, somehow....

						Michael Halle
						MIT Media Lab
						halazar@media.mit.edu
From: ib@ivan.asd.sgi.com (Ivan Bach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: a2ps & xpsview (xpsview & landscape)
Date: 30 Dec 92 18:38:38 GMT
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA

In article <34819@adm.brl.mil> pjf@osiris.cs.uoguelph.ca (Peter Jaspers-Fayer)
writes:
> the xpsview man page mentions "-la", but all that does is change the size
> of the window.
This problem was reported to Adobe last June.  The fix for this problem will 
probably be included in the next major release of the IRIX operating system.

Ivan Bach, ib@sgi.com
From: s.j.scotti@larc.nasa.gov (Stephen J. Scotti)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: Re: Where does the CPU go, when its not doing nuthin' (gr_osview)
Date: 30 Dec 1992 17:35:14 GMT
Organization: Aircraft Structures Branch, NASA Langley Research Center
Distribution: world
Reply-To: s.j.scotti@larc.nasa.gov (Stephen J. Scotti)
NNTP-Posting-Host: scotti.larc.nasa.gov


>| When looking at gr_osview, I have a program that uses about 50% of the
>| cpu (indigo R4000 elan running 4.05F). The CPU wait line in gr_osview
>| is empty, so if the cpu isn't waiting, why doesn't my program get 100%
>| of the CPU?
>| 
>| I guess the less naive way of putting this is: What factors aren't captured
>| between the CPU Usage and CPU wait?
>| 
>| [The program in question reads in a 16k chunks of stuff off of disk, messes
>| around with them and writes them out. All to local disk.]

>It's hard to say just where it is waiting.  Running osview may be
>helpful, as would 'timex -s yourprog'.  My guess is that it is indeed
>waiting for the disk part of the time.

I have been running a structural analysis finite element code on a 4d35 with 
similar problems.  I was the only user on the machine but could get no more 
than about 60% of the CPU.  I too attributed this to disk accesses but when 
we upgraded our memory from 16mb to 48mb, I found that I could get about 95% 
of the CPU!
I wonder if Dave Olson could explain that?

Stephen J. Scotti
ASB, NASA Langley Research Center
s.j.scotti@larc.nasa.gov
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
From: eng10312@nusunix1.nus.sg (NEO LIN CHEN)
Subject: fggh
Organization: National University of Singapore
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 02:49:04 GMT
From: pjf@osiris.cs.uoguelph.ca (Peter Jaspers-Fayer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.misc
Subject: a2ps & xpsview (xpsview & landscape)
Date: 29 Dec 92 18:38:24 GMT

We love a2ps.  It produces nice postscript from plain ascii or man pages.
With a duplex-capable printer, you can get 4 page images on one sheet of
paper.  Sometimes, I want to preview the output on my SGI screen, and so I
use xpsview.  Now the xpsview man page mentions "-la", but all that does
is change the size of the window.  Short of editing the postscript, is
there a way to get xpsview to rotate the image so I don't get this
terrible crick in my neck?
-- 
 /PJ      "You can't grep dead trees"             pjf@osiris.cs.uoguelph.ca
                                                         pjf@vm.uoguelph.ca
     CRT emissions are physically addictive. (Shh!)      (519)824-4120x6309