[bombcar]

Yeah the licensing is often the stumbling block, unless you can just run some bog-standard linux on it. It sounds like this might be custom enough that it would be difficult (but I daresay we'll see a post in 5 years from someone getting part of it running after finding it on the side of the road).

[gh02t]

Ultimately SGI was running Linux and AFAIK the actual hardware isn't using any secret sauce driver code, so yeah if you can get it powered on without it bursting in flames and get past the management locks you can probably get it working. It's definitely not impossible if you can somehow assemble the pieces.