Wooo! New blog. For the first few posts, this is going to be about my attempts to get OpenStep 4.2 running under parallels VM for Mac. So far, I’ve set up the VM and am wading through the release notes and installation guide. I’ve found that it should be installed without the (virtual) network cable connected, so that’s what we do.

Worryingly, the install notes say that we require a SCSI CD-ROM, but Parallels only provides an IDE one. I don’t know how that will pan out, I definitely remember one version of NeXTSTEP coming with an IDE CD-ROM driver. Let’s see.

OK, so I’ve got the OpenStep boot floppy up and running (via some failures of NeXTSTEP to provide the necessary device file to dd, and with tremendous thanks to Simon Cozens for lending use of his /dev/fd0), the compatibility BIOS isn’t an issue and the installer dutifully loads:

Now to find the drivers disk…