OPENSTEP 4.2 on VMware Fusion for OS-X Intel

The VMware Beta program started yesterday. No bdriged networking in this release, but works fine so far.

How about mouse pointer? Is it really usable?
I have to keep NEXTSTEP alive for various reasons.
Currently I run NEXTSTEP under VPC5 on G4 iMac.
I cannot upgrade to Intel Mac since NEXTSTEP runs only under VPC5 or GuestPC in Mac.
If OPENSTEP really usable under VMWare for Intel Mac, I will get it in a auction site and buy Intel Mac Pro.

Quote from: "vachouse"How about mouse pointer? Is it really usable?

I've just finished the transfer of a *big* OPENSTEP installation to Fusion, and apart from too steep a display gamma (contrast too high, 2.2 instead of 1.8 ) it's absolutely perfect. It's rock solid, even in Fusion beta much faster on a Mac Pro 2.66 GHz than on the 1 GHz Pentium I used before. I now use 1600 x 1200 display resolution with 24 bit colors, something that AFAIK was never possible with OPENSTEP and "real" hardware. It does not feel like a toy but like a workhorse.

Transferring my old data was a breeze with NFS, but you must set 1024 bit package size in the Expert options for it to work!

Note that you need special drivers for VMware:
Display: http://atomicobject.com/pages/VMWare+Display+Driver
Mouse, network and sound: http://mitglied.lycos.de/Morgon_de/

All the drivers work perfectly.  :-)

QuoteI have to keep NEXTSTEP alive for various reasons.

NEXTSTEP itself being one of the best among them ...  ;-)

It's just amazing how far ahead this OS was in its time. Heck, even the OS X of today feels like little more than a fleshed-out NEXTSTEP ...

QuoteIf OPENSTEP really usable under VMWare for Intel Mac, I will get it in a auction site and buy Intel Mac Pro.

BTW, though I've not yet tried it myself, there's no reason that NEXTSTEP 3.3 shouldn't work in VMware (alle the above drivers are for NEXTSTEP, too!)

Hi,

I have also managed to install OpenStep with vmware server 1.0.1 which is now free for personal use.

However the crazy mouse is killing me.

Could someone help me ?

Thanks in advance,
H

Edit: I have managed to install the mouse driver with the crazy mouse and then the other drivers after a reboot .
It works nicely now except that in 1024x768 mode my mouse wont go past the 640x480 part of the screen.

Any solution to that problem ?

Edit2: looks like there are problems with the FB driver on Windows XP. Looks like this is one of those problems :(

There's a special VMware mouse drive for download. It really does tend to fix things.

Hi Uli, thanks for your reply. It's encouraging.
We now have very fast (virtual) machine for OPENSTEP.
My copy of NEXTSTEP under VPC5 runs slower than on i486 66MHz real machine.

The reason why I have to keep NEXTSTEP alive includes:
(1) I did not have my copy of Mathematica upgraded to be run on OS X for financial reason,
(2) I have many old documents that can only be edited and printed properly in NEXTSTEP.

To my knowledge, NEXTSTEP never runs perfectly under any versions of VMWare, so I thought I have to obtain OPENSTEP. In fact, when I considered about what operating system I should migrate five years ago, I tried to run NEXTSTEP under VMWare in Linux. While installation went OK, graphic is very bad in windowed mode and even in full screen mode the trace of mouse pointer remained, which makes entire system unusable.

Running NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP under virtual machine in  Unix-like system has advantages to running in Windows because, in addition to NFS, we can use remote printing to CUPS.

Just a note that the problem I had with the mouse pointer being stuck to the top left 640x480 part of the screen was due to a misconfiguration of the VMware mouse driver.

On the config panel you can type in the values for your screen max x and max y. Oh and don't forget to press enter after typing each number.

It works very well for me now :)