Hi Guys,
First of all can I say how pleased I am that this site is active, I have two black boxs, one at home and one here at work and it's nice to see that I'm not the only one in the UK at least with some taste.
I recently aqquired NeXPstep of Intel (thanks ebay!) and my next project is to build a white box but I came across this site recently
http://www.koplien.de/henry/NeXT/Hardware/NeXTP4.htmlSome guy has built a white box with a P4 and various other bit's'nd peices,
Quote
* Close to 1GB main memory, 800MHz Frontside bus System-Driver EISABus-Driver PCI-Driver Intel824X0-Driver
* Graphic adapter MATROX G450 32MByte DDRAM AGP 4x, yielding a resolution of 2048x1536x32 at 82Hz Driver
* Network adapter 3Com 905B-TX with 100MBit ethernet Driver
* Adaptec SCSI controller 2940UW, supporting 15 devices on one bus under OpenStep (used) Driver
* SoundBlaster 16 (used) Driver
* PS/2-Keyboard Driver
* PS/2-Mouse Driver
Anyone one want to venture if this is the real deal (and apologies to the author if you are on this site!) I have been trying to source old crappy hardware for my whitebox esp the graphics card but am wondering now whether to just use more modern specs and have a (even faster) ****hot box instead.
Anyone like to list what hardware they are using for their white box and what drivers they used, I'm particulary interested in the graphic and network cards used.
Thanks
Derek
No you're not the only one in the UK with taste ;-)
Where are you based?
Henry is great guy and a active NeXT user (he donated VideoStream and some more apps to the community).
In general it´s not much of a problem to use OPENSTEP on modern hardware - except the NIC (I tend to use older Intel Pro 10/100 and never had any trouble) and the gfx which has to support VESA. For eg my last fast setup has been a AOpen Cube (Athlon 3200+, FX5200, 512 MB RAM).
Quote from: "brams"No you're not the only one in the UK with taste ;-)
Where are you based?
Tooting, SW London and am going to play with NeXTstep Intel this evening, I'll let you know how I get on, I've found an old cybernet all-in-one pc floating around here lost so it's going to be a test bed though not sure about the graphics,
http://www.sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=204Seems to be an SIS chip but nothing ventured...
I use a Matrox G400 on my white OPENSTEP. It works great, and it has its own native driver: Plus, there are drivers for others not so old Matrox cards.
http://mirko.yourbox.net/drivers/Matrox.html
OK, I know it's an old problem and bug in the install routine but am having probs getting the ATAPI cdrom recognised, using NS v3.3 for Intel I have an old PII with floppy and ATAPI cdrom, I do the two install disks Install - Drivers and then it asks for the drivers for the SCSI Cdrom, I've downloaded and raw wrote the beta images from apple
http://mirror.apple.com/Mirrors/Apple_Software_Updates/MultiCountry/Enterprise/nextstep/drivers/beta/EIDE.pkg.compressed
but when the disk is inserted I don't get ADAPI drivers listed , I get three SCSI drivers, so I choose one and then for the harddisk it list EDIT and ATAPI drivers...needless to say when I continue the cdrom isn't detected...any suggestions guys, have i downloaed the wrong driver disk from apple? it doesn't actually say they are for white boxes...
Cheers
Derek
Additional
Found this in the FAQ but still doesn''t work as the EIDE/ATAPI drivers aren't listed initially on the beta driver disc
Enterprise/nextstep/drivers/beta/EIDE.pkg.compressed
quote:
EIDE installation ATAPI
Load the SCSI driver and then load the EIDE driver. Don't follow the directions they give you (which are to load the CD's driver and then load the hard drive's driver). Do it backwards, so that the hard drive you are installing to gets assigned sd0. By swapping drivers like this, the CDROM gets sd1 which is what the installation procedure expects.
I guess that what happened is that the EIDE driver makes the CDROM drive masquerade as a SCSI device. And SCSI ids will be assigned to devices in the order that you load the drivers. Since the OS wants to load to sd0, that means that you have to load the hard drive's driver before the CDROM's driver, especially in this case where the CD is on one bus and the HD is on another. By doing this, the CD doesn't steal sd0 away before the SCSI driver is loaded. My guess is that if you had the CD and the hard drive on the same bus (EIDE or SCSI) you'd never have this trouble. It's just the fact that there are two busses that confuse the installation. Anyway, this worked for me (Don Yacktman don@misckit.com).
unquote
Good job! I just did much the same two days ago with a HP Pavillion 6535 relic that was laying around, but with OS 4.2. I had a matrox millenium ii laying around and used that MGA as posted above driver and boy, does that driver work great and the pavillion bios auto-disables the onboard video. Other than that I had to change the bios operating system from Windows 98 to other and I had to change the internal ide cabling so that the hard drive was the master and the cd rom drive was the slave (they were both masters on two different controllers) but other than that the only problem is identifying the onboard audio and getting that to work, and adding a network card-both in progress.
Thanks for that, eventually during the dark hours I got it up and runnng and now have my screen at 1064*768 and ?16 colours, not sure if I wanst to try running the card at a higher resolution as it only has 4 megs memory and don't wanna stuff my installation...now to find a network card and shove it on the works network, I'm sure we must have some really old NIC floating around here..
Interesting to see that the default shell is csh, couldn't find bash but I'm sure it's around somewhere..
Does anyone know what's in the 'Developer' cdrom, anything interesting or more for programmers..
Cheers
Derek
As far as I know, bash does not come with the install. I was playing around w/ NS33 on a Sparc and had to compile it. There was an issue with using the configure scripts, so I had to bootstrap using bash-1.14.7 (which doesn't have a configure script) first. After getting bash-1.14.7 compiled and installed, I was able to get bash-2.05b configured / compiled by running bash ./configure in the directory. I hope this makes sense to you.
yes it does, after years and years of Linux I know all about .configure :)
Looking at network cards now, found a 3com fast etherlink XL PCI card in the drawers here at work so that's going into 'son of tim' tomorrow evening..fingers crossed
cheers
Derek
Has anyone installed OpenStep on an EPIA?
Don't you guys think it's about time we make a compatibility database? Like the one(s) on xlr8yourmac. For HDs, CD-ROM drives, motherboards, video, ethernet and SCSI cards.
Good idea. I've never really done x86 OpenStep so I'm probably not much help...
Get's to the "Initializing System" GUI screen and hangs....
That is a very good idea.
Quote from: "minerva1961"--SNIP--
Interesting to see that the default shell is csh, couldn't find bash but I'm sure it's around somewhere..
--SNIP--
Derek
Note that both the regular Bourne shell (sh) and zsh are present. Making zsh my default shell is usually the first thing I do, and it *should* be useful for running configure scripts that barf on sh.
Quote from: "minerva1961"yes it does, after years and years of Linux I know all about .configure :)
.
/configure
@kronoman: excellent point!
So, has anyone compiled such a database?
I'm sure that NeXT had done something like a HCL a million years ago... Now that a copy of nextanswers is back online perhaps it's in there?
Quote from: "neozeed"Now that a copy of nextanswers is back online perhaps it's in there?
When was NeXTanswers not online? :?
@neozeed:
you perhaps mean this:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=70027It's a start, but I was asking in case any NeXTies had done something more extensive/exhaustive (there was some talk about that earlier in the thread, and perhaps they did something in another thread which I missed)...
I see that Henry's page is offline at the link posted at the beginning of this topic. I would like to have the specs of the P4 machines that he installed nextstep on.
If you have the site archived I would love to get ahold of the files.
Thank you
Chad
If anyone wants to have the specs used for Henry's P4 Nextstep boxes let me know I have the web pages archives including pictures of the hardware.
Thanks
Chad
Quote from: "unixphreak"I see that Henry's page is offline at the link posted at the beginning of this topic. I would like to have the specs of the P4 machines that he installed nextstep on.
If you have the site archived I would love to get ahold of the files.
Thank you
Chad
Henry's site has been moved. The page your looking for can be found here:
http://www.famkoplien.de/henry/NeXT/Hardware/NeXTP4.html
thanks for the response, and the link.