IRIX, installer un package

How do I install a package on IRIX?
Open source comes in .tardist extension files. tardist files are tar archives of inst (SGI auto-install) files. They normally install automatically when you click on them in your browser. If you didn't have auto-installation configured in your browser this may fail, in which case you may follow the following manual procedure:
    % tar xvf xxxx.tardist    # untar that tardist file
    % su            # become superuser
    # inst -f .            # install from current dir
    inst> go
    inst> quit
Automating this process:
The utility tardist does all the above automatically. To configure your browser to support auto-install (i.e. calling tardist or SoftwareManager automatically when you click on a .tardist file on the web) you should have two entries added to your mailcap file (either your personal ~/.mailcap or, depending on your browser version, the system one in /var/netscape/.../mailcap, /usr/local/.../mailcap, or equivalent).
    application/x-install; \
    /usr/sbin/SoftwareManager -a -F %s ; \
    description="SGI automatic software installation"
    application/x-tardist; \
    /usr/sbin/SoftwareManager -a -f %s ; \
    description="SGI software distribution archive"
All this should work out of the box on recent IRIX releases. It is just on older IRIX systems (6.2) that you may need to go through the manual procedure.


Cf. http://freeware.sgi.com/faq.html