Hey everyone, I think this question has been asked before... but it was several years ago. Has anyone ever heard of or seen a working VNC Server for OpenStep? I virtualize OpenStep and while I can get network connections to and from it, it is pretty difficult to manage because it has to capture the mouse in VirtualBox. This makes the built in Microsoft Remote Desktop support of VirtualBox pretty useless because it's almost impossible to control the mouse.
I virtualize Mac OS X a lot and every version of Mac OS X had either the built in VNC server or the older versions could use Apple Remote Desktop which has a VNC mode and it just makes it so easy to VNC into these machines to control.
So I was wondering if anyone has ever seen VNC server software for OpenStep. Thanks!
Hi jeffberg, I am only aware of the VNCViewer.app client, but not of a VNC server.
There is a mailing list thread here (
https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/bZUQ7MnU/nshosting-on-openstep-nt-yellowbox-win-or-webobjects) from Nov, 2000 that claims -NSHost can be used to display clients on an NT machine with OpenStep installed. Maybe you could set up a frontend VM running NT and put RDP or VNC on that, instead. This section of the Network Administration Manual (
https://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_administration/03_SetUpNet.htmld/index.html) may be useful, though it refers to the older -NXHost instead of -NSHost.
I agree strongly that it's a shame there isn't a better driver for the mouse in Virtual Box. Even on Windows the PS/2 mouse is erratic and jerky. Maybe you could look into it, Jeff? We have the VMMouse source, and you already improved that VBoxVideo driver...
There's a discussion about creating a VNC server in this thread.
https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=5395Hope that helps.
@Nitro thanks for the link! I might try to DM the
@bheron and see if he is interested in picking it back up.
@Rhetorica and I actually did look into doing the Mouse driver. Because I have the source for the VMWare mouse driver. In principle they work the same way its just virtualbox and VMware put the information in a different format in different parts of the memory. But it's really low level programming and I'm honestly not that experienced with it so I sort of gave up. But that is another option. I wrote a todo list for myself and resources to start the project here
https://github.com/jeffreybergier/VBoxMouse
Quote from: user217 on May 29, 2025, 04:02:49 PMThere is a mailing list thread here (https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/bZUQ7MnU/nshosting-on-openstep-nt-yellowbox-win-or-webobjects) from Nov, 2000 that claims -NSHost can be used to display clients on an NT machine with OpenStep installed. Maybe you could set up a frontend VM running NT and put RDP or VNC on that, instead. This section of the Network Administration Manual (https://www.nextop.de/NeXTstep_3.3_administration/03_SetUpNet.htmld/index.html) may be useful, though it refers to the older -NXHost instead of -NSHost.
After
extensively messing around with OPENSTEP Enterprise on Windows NT 4, 2000, and 10, I am convinced this is not and never was possible:
(from OS4.2 release notes)
The closest I was trying to run an OSE binary on Windows NT 4 with -NXHost, targeting my OS4.2 machine as the display server. The console log on the OS4.2 machine gave the mysterious message:
I'm pretty sure this means there's a fundamental binary format incompatibility between the two.
NeXTanswers 1365 furthermore says:
So it is not really a surprise that I was unable to get Rhapsody to participate in my various experiments. From my understanding of various marketing materials I've read, it seems like NXHosting is less of a protocol (in the X11 or VNC sense) and more like splitting the application into interface and logic portions that operate in lockstep via the magic of Mach's dispatch mechanism. (OBJECTS!) It's
incredibly cool technology, but basically the software equivalent of a gadgetbahn (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadgetbahn); it's no small wonder that virtually all internet-based APIs these days are JSON over HTTP instead of EOF.
Disregard previous post!
Coming soon to a Sick OPENSTEP Tricks (
https://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=5967) thread near you...
@jeffberg After messing with this for a little bit I now unironically think that you should set up an NT 4 VM in lieu of a VNC Server. It runs a lot better than VNC would, though of course the gamma curve isn't to my personal taste.
The current caveats are:
- Workspace Manager won't play ball.
- Launching apps with windows always requires the -NXHost (or -NSHost) argument, so you can't quite just fire up a Terminal.app and use the 'open' command as you might on GNUstep.
- So far it seems it must be (very similar) major versions on both ends—I've got OPENSTEP for Mach 4.2 and OPENSTEP for Windows 4.1.
The important part is making sure NetInfo on the OPENSTEP box has a name for the NT machine. This can be done in /NextAdmin/HostManager.app.
Happily, NT 4 has full guest integrations under VirtualBox, so things like freely resizing the screen and mousing in and out of the window are reliable. Clipboard integration is not so strong; I can copy text from NXHosted apps right out of the VM, but text copied
into the VM never reaches the Pasteboard server. OPENSTEP also doesn't seem to pick up on the screen resolution changes, but that's hardly something it can be faulted for.
@Rhetorica whoa! that is wild. I couldn't quite follow. So you are running two VM's one is running OpenStep i386 and one is running windows NT. Then you install OpenStep for NT in the NT one and remotely connect to the apps running in the vanilla Openstep in the other VM?
Quote from: jeffberg on June 06, 2025, 02:58:45 AM@Rhetorica whoa! that is wild. I couldn't quite follow. So you are running two VM's one is running OpenStep i386 and one is running windows NT. Then you install OpenStep for NT in the NT one and remotely connect to the apps running in the vanilla Openstep in the other VM?
Exactly. The gotchas are:
- It
must be OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows. No YellowBox.
- It
must be Windows NT 4. 2000 won't run OSE.
- The NT machine must have an entry in NetInfo on the OPENSTEP machine, which can be created with HostManager.app. -NXHost only accepts NetInfo hostnames, not IP addresses. If your OPENSTEP VM is normally solo, it can be made into a NetInfo master.
- You must have a user account with matching name and password on both VMs; case-sensitive.
I am working on a full guide and a tour for my Oddities & Aberrations curio shelf, but those will take a little while.
I was looking through the code of OSXVNC which was a VNC Server that worked on the original versions of OSX. I thought the approaches used in this app might work in OpenStep. Unfortunately, it looks like it uses a lot of CoreGraphics code... which makes sense because that is OS X's system for drawing but the problem with that is OpenStep did not have CoreGraphics, it had display postscript. So it is possible that these functions existed in OpenStep but they just don't start with CG and instead start with PS but I'm not really confident of that.
I am not sure this path is a road worth going down either :-/
https://github.com/stweil/OSXvnc/blob/0bf6ef1f2faf213f1f3d3eb1ca7d96fe84925d87/OSXvnc-server/localbuffer.cThe random part is I saw the copyright at the top of the document and I was shocked to see that this code written in 2002 was written by none-other than our very own
@mihai of InfiniteMac fame! Small world for sure!
Quote from: jeffberg on July 07, 2025, 09:20:32 PMThe random part is I saw the copyright at the top of the document and I was shocked to see that this code written in 2002 was written by none-other than our very own @mihai of InfiniteMac fame! Small world for sure!
Whoa, that is a throwback. Surprised it's still in there, it's definitely some sketchy code (I was just getting started with Mac OS X development and was more comfortable with QuickDraw (from Classic), hence the Frankenstein combination of that and CoreGraphics.