Yesterday, thanking Guido, my SGI Octane had a fresh install of the colourful IRIX operating system. After some "minor conflicting problems", the system came up delightfully, but with the usual boring desktop backgrounds bundled with the OS... As it seems to me a little bit wearisome to replace these graphics with my own pictures, I decided to drop some lines here, as a mental note for those who come accross the same problem.

First of all, you can find a bunch of useful tips and tricks googling "IRIX desktop background", but I know we are all too lazy to surf along the waves of thousand of internet pages dealing with the matter. So here's the tip! In a few words, the turning point is represented by the editing of the file /var/X11/xdm/Xservers. Adding the lines 

:0 secure /usr/bin/X11/X -bs -nobitscale -c -pseudomap 4sight -solidroot sgilightblue -cursorFG red -cursorBG white -class TrueColor -depth 24

and re-starting the X server solves the problem in a second. Of course I edited also the file .backgrounds in my home directory, adding at its bottom the lines

background "SimoSGI"

     command "-xpm /usr/people/USER/sgi.xpm"

     default "-xpm /usr/people/USER/sgi.xpm"

     readok "-xpm /usr/people/USER/sgi.xpm"

where sgi.xpm is a 1280x1024 background image, saved with the proprietory .xpm format (I converted the original .jpg image simply with the Gimp!). Now the last step:

Toolchest > Desktop > Customize > Background > choose your image!

Just re-start the X server et voilà! Now your IRIX desktop is glittering in light!!!