Any BOINC or other fun projects still usable on MIPS/IRIX?

[SanRamonFieldOffice]

Hello SGI Fans, I have a working R5000 O2 here that is still a loyal and worthy memento from the glory days. It would be fun to give this IRIX 6.5 machine something to do. As you know, SETI is completely concluded (on all platforms), nor can I find evidence that anyone has compiled other BOINC projects for MIPS/IRIX.

Installing Linux on the machine wouldn't be my first choice, but even that doesn't seem to help with the software availability problem. Nothing is ported to MIPS:

BOINC/Projects - Debian Wiki

So... any and all suggestions are welcome. I'm open to anything computationally expensive that would give the little box a chance to show its stuff one more time. Doesn't have to be BOINC-based. -BGU

 

[massiverobot]

Sure, you can port BOINC over to IRIX, using the modern GNU toolchain and tools provided by our very own RSE (rpm software enviroment) for IRIX:

BuildSystem – BOINC

boinc.berkeley.edu

GitHub - sgidevnet/sgug-rse: Silicon Graphics User Group RPM Software Environment

Silicon Graphics User Group RPM Software Environment - sgidevnet/sgug-rse

github.com

It would be a great learning experience and everyone with a SGI would thank you!

-andy

 

[SanRamonFieldOffice]

OK that could be fun. Of course, we would need a port of one of the science applications to go along with that. Any recommendation which would be the simplest?

 

[Unxmaal]

The first thing I'd do is check if there's existing FC31 SRPMs. Why spend the time packaging by hand if someone else has already done most of the work?

I searched for 'boinc' here and found https://pkgs.org/download/boinc-client .

I know I want the srpm from Updates, so https://fedora.pkgs.org/31/fedora-updates-x86_64/boinc-client-7.16.6-6.fc31.x86_64.rpm.html .

My eyes glazed over at that list of deps. We have a bunch of them, but I'm ready to go for it!

Grab the source package URL https://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/updates/31/Everything/SRPMS/Packages/b/boinc-client-7.16.6-6.fc31.src.rpm and install it.

Of course that URL doesn't work, so we go here https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/updates/31/Everything/SRPMS/Packages/b/ and get https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/updates/31/Everything/SRPMS/Packages/b/boinc-client-7.16.6-6.fc31.src.rpm .

First pass at building shows miserable failures!

rpmbuild -ba --undefine=_disable_source_fetch SPECS/boinc-client.spec --nocheck
sh: ${v:0:4}: bad substitution
sh: ${c:0:7}: bad substitution
error: Failed build dependencies:
docbook2X is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips
freeglut-devel is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips
libXScrnSaver-devel is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips
libnotify-devel is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips
mesa-libGLU-devel is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips
wxGTK3-devel is needed by boinc-client-7.16.6-6.sgug.mips

At this point, I'd extract the downloaded source tarball and check ./configure options to see if I could build it without all this X stuff.