I'm working on a white build again.
I also decided to take another look at Qemu and VBox for Openstep 4.2.
These both led me to build a hard-disk based installer for Openstep 4.2.
This has probably been done, but not by me, and as far as I know, not since magneto-optical days.
- Build a disk with BuildDisk
- Copy NeXTCD/ into the root of your new disk
- Modify /private/Drivers/i386/System.config/instance0.table
- Add drivers to /private/Drivers/i386/ like the VESA 2.0 driver which is enabled for the installer and the "Y2K" patch EIDE driver
There may be one or two more things, but this is essentially all.
Obey the usual recommendations about Pri/Secondary ATA device enumeration and let me know how you get on. I may open this up on github.
It works in vbox and qemu. Testing on the P4 today.
It's also uploading to my website at
https://juddy.org/NeXT/ReOPENSTEP_4.2_install.v1.img
Nice work! You can also apply patch 4 (
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2187.msg12685#msg12685) to the image so that you have updated disk utilities and other fixes.
Patch 4 is installed for the installation image, but still is required during the secondary install.
I'd like to rework the BaseSystem BOM to include Patch 4, Developer as well as the Lighthouse apps and a bunch of other additions.
Doing that requires moving beyond a POC using a clean build and bom generation process. We'll see. I picked this on Friday up intending to spend 2 hours on it. Here I am at the end of Sunday with a vision for a new Openstep system image build pipeline...
I looked at it a few months ago and that's where I was stuck; not sure how to modify the BOM or create a new one.
I did not use BuildDisk for this, I have simply set up my desired OPENSTEP environment in a virtual machine using VMware and then imaged that virtual disk file to a real physical hard drive (or CompactFlash/SD card in an IDE adapter) using an IDE to USB adapter on a modern computer. There's software called Vmdk2Phys which allows you to image a virtual disk to a real disk or vice-versa.
You can then install the physical disk into the OPENSTEP PC and boot using the config=Default flag, then set the drivers for the machine once you're in the GUI.
I've used this method to successfully install OPENSTEP on my IBM ThinkPad 760XL and it worked great. I've tried it both with a real IDE disk drive and a CompactFlash card using a CF to IDE adapter, both were fine.