To continue my ongoing obsession of keeping old computers alive, I decided to make an old Silicon Graphics O2 workstation usable with modern open-source software. I had earlier purchased this beautiful box used from my employer and it continued to be collecting dust in my possession as well.
This unit has 128MB of SDRAM and a 150MHz R10000 MIPS RISC processor. It’s quite capable today as a web server, for example and of course it looks pretty damn cool! 
Why NetBSD?
The original operating system on the machine was IRIX, the SGI’s own Unix which I don’t have much experience of. Some say it’s pretty good but I’ve accustomed to Linux and NetBSD. Of course I didn’t have much of a choise anyway: I didn’t get any IRIX installation media with the box.
So the path was set: either Linux or NetBSD. I would have preferred Linux but the MIPS architecture port of seems to be broken for this particular processor (R10000). Luckily it seemed that NetBSD folk had been more active on this front and a working port was available.
These are roughly the steps necessary for installation:
- CD-ROM install was out of the question since no suitable CDROM image for the installer was available.
- O2 PROM is able to load kernel (installer) from a nfs share. I configured a Linux box as a DHCP server and NFS share. Instructions for this are available in the NetBSD MIPS installation guide.
- Important: I had to configure ipv6 off in Linux to make things work. This was a major bottleneck in the installation.
Drop a comment if you need more information.
Next I’ll just have to install NetBSD on my good old Amiga 4000. I just need to fix it first.
