The exact requirements will largely depend on what you intend to use the machine for and how you wish to go about installing Gentoo. The following table should give you a rough idea.
| Minimum | Recommended | Ideal |
|---|---|---|
| RAM: | ||
| HDD: |
If you lack an appropriate Framebuffer, you will be required to use serial
console. Serial console programs for linux include
As an aid to the project, a
The following systems are known to be very stable overall. Just about all the core hardware is supported in these systems, and there are very few outstanding stability issues at this time.
At present, only the Newport (XL) graphics framebuffer is supported in Linux. Therefore on systems with other framebuffers, you will need to use serial console.
The Challenge S has its RJ-45 connector on a daughter board (Mezz) linked with an unsupported SCSI adapter, a WD33C95A. In order for this network connector to function, this SCSI bus needs to be activated, however it is not yet supported by Linux. As a result of this, the Challenge S can only get network connectivity via its AUI connector.
Indigo2 EISA Support is
The O2 RM7000 Processor support is limited in Linux currently, as it requires a fairly recent kernel version (>2.6.7), and has several notable issues. The first issue is a problem with scsi at the moment, making the internal disks unusable at the current time. The Level 3 (Tertiary) Cache is also disabled due to there being no support for this cache in the linux kernel.
Please be aware that this note only applies to the official SGI RM7000 running at 350MHz, not the 600MHz RM7000 that can be assembed using an RM5200 board. These "modded" CPU modules for O2 systems are not supported/tested, although, in theory, they should be functional, but may suffer from the same problems listed above.
The systems listed here are known to run Linux...
IP28 Indigo2 Impact support (classified as an Indigo2 system w/ an R10000
Processor) is
Octane support in Linux should be regarded as experimental. Support for this
particular machine from SGI has been progressing quite well and the Linux
kernel functions reasonably well. The current status for this system may be
found on
Just about all of these systems are totally unsupported at the kernel level --
making a full Linux system totally impossible. Little is known about a lot of
the systems listed here -- therefore any support in the near future is highly
unlikely. You may wish to keep an eye on the
As with most systems, there is quite wide array of peripherals that one can obtain for Silicon Graphics systems. While a lot of these work in IRIX, Linux support is a bit touch-and-go on some of these items. The following table lists the support for each device.
| Unsupported/Untested | Experimental Support | Stable Support |
|---|---|---|
The Cobalt servers are a set of machines all based around the QED RM523[01]
CPU. They came in two varieties, the RaQ -- a rackmounted model, and the Qube,
a small desktop model (1ft. cube). The big difference between these systems
and the SGI systems above, is that these systems are
These were also sold under an OEM arragement to other companies, examples of this are the Gateway Microserver (Qube 2) and the Seagate NasRaQ (RaQ 2).
The Qube 2700 was the first of this whole subarchitecture. Unfortunately, it
lacks a serial port, making installation at present, damn near impossible.
We're looking into ways we can support this system, but as none of the
developers have access to one of these machines, we have no way to test our
efforts. You may wish to have a look at