My OS install CD (OPENSTEP 4.2 USER) was broken, and the 'bchunk' bit has to do with burning a replacement OS installation CD. Here is another chapter in the boot CD process: The initial driver CD I made was from a modified driver disk, tailored for VMware installation. After installing OPENSTEP, I installed the developer tools, and then updated to Patch 4.This is a good walkthrough of the installation steps in a VM.I then booted the OPENSTEP VM with an Ubuntu ISO, and used dd to copy the VM disk onto the Libretto HD (installed in a USB enclosure and passed through to the VM). I put the HD back in the Libretto. Openstep Installation Instructions Note that to boot from a CD, sparc workstations need SCSI CDROM drives that provide 512-byte sectors, instead of the more common 2048-byte sectors. Older drives from Plextor, Yamaha, and Pioneer typically have a jumper that sets the sector size.
Location: GUIs > Apple > OPENSTEP 4.2Screen shots.
NeXTStep was the operating system created for the NeXT computer (a Motorola68K based machine), and later ported to to the Intel x86/PC platform whenNeXT shifted focus from being a hardware company to a software company.OPENSTEP is the descendant of NeXTStep, although technically 'OPENSTEP'refers to a set of portable APIs based on those of NeXTStep that NeXT madeavailable on Mach (The Unix-ish core that NeXTStep ran on), Windows NT,and Solaris. These screen shots are of OPENSTEP/Mach for x86.
OPENSTEP booting up.
After logging in OPENSTEP starts the desktop and launches the WorkspaceManager, a kind of file manager.
Interestingly this is running on generic a pentium PC, rather than NeXThardware.
Like MacOS, OPENSTEP has a single menu for all running applications.
Unlike MacOS the menu is in a draggable window that defaults to theupper left of the screen. When you click on a menu item it stays up, evenif you click on something else on the screen (besides another menu item).
There is a standard toolbar that is always present and always visibleon the right side of the screen. Items can be added and removed just bydragging their icon to or from the toolbar.
This user interface is designed for much higher resolutions (at least1024*768), at the 640*480 resolution used for these screen shots the menubar and toolbar always seem to be in the way.
The file viewer, by default, displays folders as a series of columns.Selecting a folder opens it in the next column. For deeper folders morecolumns are added and the horizontal scroll bar is used to move throughall the columns.
The workspace manager file viewer can display files as a set of columns(shown in previous screen shot), a detailed file list, or as icons.
Openstep Installation Instructions Kit
An interesting thing about the NeXTStep / OPENSTEP user interface isthat the scroll bars are on the left. For left handed people this kindof makes more sense, and it is usually easier to keep your eye on the scrollbar while reading text.
The configuration tool shows what hardware devices are installed andlets you make changes to their settings.
The preference panel contains the more common user settings for thedesktop..
Underneath the hood OPENSTEP runs on top of a kind of Unix.
A example of a typical OPENSTEP application.
OPENSTEP includes the OmniWeb web browser. Here is the obligatory screenshot of yet another browser viewing Slashdot.
A larger screen shot of OPENSTEP running several additional demo applications.
A company I worked for sent me along with two senior colleagues to a shop which was showing both the NeXT cube and the NeXTStep system ported on x86 hardware, and the experience was totally worth the early morning (late night) wake up plus following 5 hours train trip; it was about 1993 or 1994. The cube was absolutely gorgeous looking, and being then myself an Amiga fan its Motorola CPU to me was something to be proud of.The demonstration wasn't the usual smoke and mirrors wrapped in corporate speech: the guy wrote some code on the cube and built a small GUI program to show the development system and libraries, then he took the same code, copied it to a x86 machine nearby running the ported OS and built it to obtain the same program. Just wow! Back then running different hardware and CPU architectures meant sort of living on a different planet, and we just saw someone building a space bridge between two distant planets, making software development much easier.We eventually got back with some promo material and the idea that we were did indeed experience a milestone in the IT development, but the price tag was something a very small company could not invest for research alone, so they abandoned the idea.
Openstep Installation Instructions Outdoor
About WindowMaker: I loved it and used it extensively both at home and work in the early 2k. In one project I had to build the simplest possible user interface for roughly 50 remote stations hundreds of kilometers away where the users were mostly completely new to computers, therefore the risk of clogging the support seat with panic calls was really high.Luckily WindowMaker and its kiosk mode came to rescue: I built a really basic desktop screen in which the user could not alter the system in any way, providing buttons for simple tasks like running a browser, fetch or send mail using a client, ask for remote support, print documents we sent through scp or mail attachments, shutdown/reboot etc.An interesting challenge was easing the support login since all those terminals had dynamic IP, and we simply couldn't ask to the operators to start a reverse ssh from their side, but thanks to some Ruby scripts in the background, each remote machine would obtain and send its public IP and some more information to the local server in which a Ruby+Glade GTK app would add them to a list, so that the support operator would click on a station name and the ssh to that machine would open in seconds.In the end it worked so well that the support colleague spent most of her time twiddling thumbs.