Hello everybody,
let me introduce myself as a new forum member from Barcelona/Spain.
My interest in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP has come a long way since starting to use Linux in 1994 shortly after acquiring my first i486 PC. Back then, all this computer stuff was still completely new to me, but after having experienced the superior capabilities of Linux in comparison to the preinstalled Windows for Workgroups 3.11, the latter was quickly dismissed as being neglectable.
The first hints at NeXTSTEP came with the introduction and installation of the Window Maker window manager in Debian Linux, which i both still use up until today. The second hints arrived when i had some superficial exposure to a NeXTCube during a system administration student job at a German university, where i was mostly busy compiling free software from source on HP-UX 9 machines.
I was eventually gifted a HP 715/64 by my employer back then which i still own today running NeXTSTEP 3.3 HPPA via a BlueSCSI adapater. This machine is rarely used nowadays as it is much too slow and noisy for my taste and i will probably sell it some day on a well known auction web site. Nostalgia for old hardware is not really my thing since i am more interested in the software side of things.
Another machine runnning OPENSTEP 4.2 is a white box hosting an ASUS TUSL2-C board with 512MB RAM, a PIII Tualatin 1,2GHz CPU, and a Matrox G450 graphics card. The OPENSTEP installation was done by simply cloning a Virtualbox VM to the system's 10GB hard disk instead of jumping through all the floppy based installation hoops. This system is much more usable thanks to its comparatively faster speed and excellent display resolution granted by the MatroxMGA driver.
A personal project of mine since 2011 is a Debian based Linux Live CD using Window Maker as its primary user interface and which can also be installed to hard disk, serving as an alternative to the usual Debian installation CD's. To see what this is about please have a look at
https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and
https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads of the ISO images. The idea behind this is not trying to emulate the old NeXTSTEP environment but unifying all the Linux goodness with a properly preconfigured Window Maker desktop. Apart from the superficial GUI desktop portion the most ineresting components are on the command line, providing a maximum of useful utilities and programs mostly interesting for experienced system administrators. Every ISO image always contains the full source code of the build tree it was built from, so that interested people are enabled to recreate the ISO based on their own modifications.
Since a few months i have started using the Previous emulator and i am very impressed with it's capabilities. I plan to properly package it as a Debian package and also include it in a future Window Maker Live release.
Enough said about myself for now.
Thanks for the incredible resource that is nextcomputers.org and which has helped me a lot to understand the idiosyncracies of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP.