A tech recycler near me has a pallette of Dell Poweredge 2400s, mostly PIII 512mb. I didn't think much about them at the time, but started thinking about getting one for NS 3.3. There is an ISA slot for soundcard/DSP (essential for what I want to do with NextStep). I'll need a compatible PCI video card, right? Is there is a simple/elegant way to also use some kind of SCSI->CF/SD card solution for HDD and getting the system installed?
Is this a reasonable platform for working with NS 3.3 and doing audio stuff? I was previously thinking of going the route of ThinkPad 755 + ThinkPad dock with ISA soundcard, but this might be easier/cheaper?
Hello: It should work, use the dual channel eide driver for the cdrom and harddrive and set the partition size to 2 gb. Best Regards Rob Blessin
You can install Nextstep 3.1 or greater using a Adaptec 154x ISA adapter. The 2490 PCI is available in 3.3 or greater. I've used both w/o issues.
As far as installation:
1) For SCSI installation You probably need to get the appropriate device driver from floppy image to do the installation (found at this site). You'll need a SCSI CDROM.
2) You could do an IDE installation, then migrate the disk image to SCSI and make it bootable.
Neither is what I would call simple or elegant, but definitely doable with a little research and/or coaching. SCSI does have the advantage of more capacity and disk volumes than IDE.
Suggest using the SCSI2SD Card.