I know that there’ve been mixed results in trying to get OPENSTEP booting on Parallels Desktop RC, but it Works For Me^{TM}. In case this is a particularly special piece of information, I upgraded directly from beta 4 (which I’d previously been using because 5 onwards were breaking the VBE driver). Both immediately after the upgrade, and following a reboot (I remembered that Parallels installs a kext, and thought it best to verify this), OPENSTEP boots up in glorious(?) multicolour.
Eww, although there’s a graphics glitch displaying the "please wait until it’s safe to turn off your computer" screen.
Update 2006-06-01 11:08 GMT: and so does RC2.
Have you had any luck getting networking going? I have successfully installed the NE2K driver, and I have some indication that the OpenStep system is aware of the host (the host’s hostname shows up in various situations) but I can’t actually figure out how to configure the network. I found some instructions on configuring HostManager, but I can’t seem to enter any text in the fields there…
Any luck?
Yup, all works for me, I used ftp to get the y2k patches, have mounted my NFS home drive and surfed the web on Lighthouse Design’s OmniWeb :-). Hmmm…I’m not at my Intel box so this is all from memory, and I’m not sure what your problem might be so I’m going to take everything from the ground up. Apologies if I’m teaching grandmother to suck eggs :-)
First, check that you have the correct NE2k driver, as there’s at least one other version around which alledgedly doesn’t work as well/at all. This version should just auto-configure in Configure.app, then networking’s good to go.
Now go into NetInfo Manager, and remove the ‘serves’ property from /machines/broadcasthost. Unless you actually do have a networked NetInfo domain running where you are, this will just cause an annoying timeout in the boot process.
Skip HostManager, just log in as root and use your favourite text editor to change the entries in /etc/hostconfig to do what your network requires. Again, this is all from memory but you need at least to set HOSTNAME, INETADDR, ROUTER, IPNETMASK and IPBROADCAST. You might see an entry like:
ROUTER=-ROUTED-
but it’s better to hard-code the router addr in here, in case some modern routeds don’t speak NeXT’s language. Oh, and don’t use the same IP address as the host Mac :-)
Set up /etc/resolv.conf with your nameservers and (possibly) search domain(s). It’s probably not a bad idea to put an entry for the system’s own public IP into netinfo’s /machines/ dir; if you’re not comfortable doing that with NetInfo manager then read the man page for niload to see how to use a UNIX hosts file to populate netinfo.
Erm, that should be it. hostconfig is sourced by the rc scripts so you need to reboot for that lot to stick, but then you ought to be good to go.
Wow, you rock! Can’t wait to try your suggestions, and I think I did have the other NE2K, so maybe that’s it! Thank you so much. It’s a fine old OS.
MC
One more question, if you have the time–what range of IP addresses do I use, my actual server for the Host machine, or the different 10.37.129.x range that Parallels seems to give out?
Use an IP address on the same network range as your host machine.
Thanks! That did it! Am posting this using OmniWeb 3.0 for OpenStep!
Now working on getting host and guest to share…
Try as I might, I’ve been trying to get that NE2k driver you linked above (“the correct NE2k driver”), and my Parallels RC2 just doesn’t see it. I copy it as so:
# cd /NE2k
# (tar -cvf – NE2K.config) | (cd /private/Drivers/i386 ; tar -xf -)
I then go into Configure.app (as “me”). It sees the device and offers to load the driver. As you suggest, I take its default.
When I reboot, I see two instances of the driver in Configure.app, but nothing shows up in /usr/log/messages, and ifconfig shows only lo0.
Am I maybe doing something wrong? :(
Well, I decided to retry as root, and it worked that time. I now have en0 (or was it eth0?) and I can ping my local router. Now I need to get some network apps so that I can really use this.
But I’m still having trouble with the installation of patch 3 to use the VESA driver, so I’m stuck at 640×480, 2-bit. Hopefully I’ll figure that out soon.
OK, sorry to keep posting. Last time.
Turns out there’s a patch 4 for OPENSTEP 4.2. This installs on my system, and it gives me VESA compatibility. SWEET!
daniel: always the way. Whenever I post to a newsgroup I usually solve the problem within five minutes; I think it’s something about the act of posting makes you see the problem differently :)
leeg, any suggestions on where to get software? All of my NeXT software is for my old Cube – almost all of it is m68k only – very little of what I have comes as fat binaries.
What I would especially love to have is fat binaries of WriteNow and Improv – both apps that I own many times over, but they are all m68k only. :(
Well, the Peak FTP server is still up which will have some stuff, the other NeXT software archive was Peanuts which seems down at the moment. I really can’t comment on any particular commercial software like Improv or WriteNow, as I don’t know (a)whether anyone has the files, (b)what the distribution terms are.
The Omni Group have an FTP server with legacy versions of their software for NS, OS, Rhapsody, Yellow Box etc.
daniel: patch 4 broke my Openstep it cannot boot again. I fixed this by replacing the VBE aware boot image to the old one. Now OS42 boots again without a usable resolution.
How did you manage to boot your OPENSTEP without freezing it at boot time?
if you are using a mac(most likely), to get the patch 4 driver into openstep its easy, if you have toast 7. just start off making an iso9660 cd and add the .pkg installer, then instead of burning it, goto file save as and save it as a .toast file. then from the finder change it ti iso. now you can use it from openstep.
If you don’t have Toast, you can get MacPorts (previously DarwinPorts), and then use it to get CDRtools (both are free). You need the Xcode Tools installed (also free, comes with OS X) to use MacPorts. I have not yet found a binary package of CDRTools for Mactels.