IRIX tricks

Preventing rld library location errors when using sudo

sudo strips all variables beginning with LD_ which hoses the runtime linker (because it relies on environment variables, not on a config file like ldconfig). To rectify this, add these lines to your sudoers file:

Defaults env_keep=LD_LIBRARYN32_PATH
Defaults env reset

If you want to keep other ENV variables too, double quote the list and have spaces, eg:

Defaults env_keep="LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH"

Making xterm work

If you install xterm, remember to rename the xterm shipped with IRIX (because it's old and it sucks) that lives in /usr/bin/X11. Also, the default 'fixed' font included with IRIX is ugly. I added these to my ~/.Xdefaults:

 XTerm*font: -sgi-screen-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-m-80-iso8859-1
 XTerm*scrollBar: false

Enabling 24 bit color

Add -class TrueColor -depth 24 to /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers

Enabling xauth

You need to enable the security extension for the X server. Edit /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers and add -securityExt to the end of the line. Then touch .Xauthority and run 'xauth generate :0 . trusted to generate a key. Here's a recommended command string for generating a xauth entry:

xauth generate <your_hostname>:0 . trusted timeout 3600

Changing maximum argument length

IRIX defaults to a rather small value for the maxmium number of argument characters on the command line. You can change this pretty easily by running

# systune ncargs <some big number>
# autotune
# reboot

Look at /var/sysgen/mtune/kernel for more information and run `systune ncargs` to get the current value. I used 262144 for my new limit (default was 20480).