[GRASS5] Re: IRIX Binaries

[Andreas Lange]

Paul Kelly wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Paul Kelly wrote:
> 
> > > It is o32 (old library format), so it is not very useful for anyone
> > > running IRIX 6.x.
> >
> > I don't understand this; I compiled it on 6.2 and it runs fine on 6.4; I
> > thought all later versions were backward-compatible with o32 so I compiled
> > it like this for maximum portability.
> > I can create an n32 version as well if you think it would be useful.
> >
> > > 5.x/6.x???). I tested on an Indy R5000 with IRIX 6.5 and most of the
> > > freeware installed.
> >
> > We do have an Indy running 6.5 here but it is turned off at the minute and
> > doesn't have a mouse. I will get it going and give it a try on it.
> >
> 
> I have now installed it on an Indy R4600 (100MHz) running IRIX 6.5 and
> everything works (still have to start it from an xterm though). I was
> pleasantly surprised at the speed also. Even SG3d and NVIZ were perfectly
> usable on this old machine.
> 
> So I really can't understand why the binaries wouldn't work on a 6.5
> machine. Was there any kind of error message? I should have mentioned the
> problem with the IRIX winterm though. I am so used to always running
> GRASS from an xterm that it slipped my mind. So I will have a look at this
> sometime.

Hi Paul,

thanks for the reply. You are correct, if i start grass from xterm it
works. 
But i don't remember this problem from the distribution i created
myself. I am not able to start grass with the bash shell, grass uses ksh
instead. I can not remember the status on the other machine. 

For the o32/n32 and mips-2/mips-3 discussion: I asked several people
about the lowest common denominator for IRIX (two years ago) and it was
consensus to use n32 and mips-3. I doubt that anyone uses IRIX 5.x and a
machine with mips-2 architecture (i. e. R2000/R3000 processor!) for
grass. n32 and mips-3 mean IRIX 6.2 and higher and any machine with
R4x00 processor and up. mips-4 will exclude users of R4K and R5K
processors, the 64-bit ABI does not really work with grass.
Speed is important if you run interpolations on big raster data sets,
but i never did any comparisons. 
 
It is my belief that we should try to avoid compatibility problems as
far as possible and not to change decisions already made. 

But it is your build and your decision. 

Andreas

-- 
Andreas Lange, 65187 Wiesbaden, Germany, Tel. +49 611 807850