I acquired a mostly-broken 68030 cube some time ago, and I just got it working, finally.
When I got it, it had 8MB of RAM, a 100MB disk that was ziptied (yes, really!) into the internal cage, a PSU that was so full of cruft I was afraid it would catch fire, and a fan with a broken connector flange, so I couldn't even hook the power up to the fan.
Well, after some monkeying, it now works.
I acquired a bunch of RAM, upgrading the 030 board to 32MB, but shortly thereafter I lucked into an 040/25 Cube mobo and an ND card without RAM. After digging through my pile of old RAM, I found 32MB for the ND, and transplanted the 32 from the 030 to the 040, adding to the 32 it already had. I also came up with three Seagate disks (1, 2 and 4.5GB) and a Plextor 12x external CDROM. I found a replacement fan, only to discover that it was a 120v, not 12v, motor. Nuts. So I clipped out the connector from the 120v fan and soldered it to the motor leads for the 12v one. While ugly, this MacGyverism seemed to work.
So, I MacGyvered a way to mount the drive rails that came with it without zipties, using motherboard standoffs from a dead x86 box as retaining nuts, strapped in a second disk, attached the third in an external cage, then plugged it in. At first, nothing seemed to work at all, then I discovered that the backplane had been tweaked to have 2 slot 0s, and my ND was in the other slot 0. Hmm. So, I tried to move it to the leftmost slot, but it wouldn't fit as the SIMMs were too tall. So, in the rightmost slot it went. I was a bit worried about heat, but so far it's been no problem at all.
On the second attempt, it fired up just fine, and after trying unsuccessfully to boot from the internal disk (which I think had Solaris on it, so no surprise there!), it dropped me into the ROM monitor. I tried several times to convince it to boot from CD, but to no avail. I also lacked an extra floppy drive, so it was time to get creative. I cannibalized my mostly-non-working Color slab for its FD, complete with the short slab cable, and jimmied it on just long enough to boot NS and get it installed. This worked, and soon I was on my way after putting the FD back into the slab.
Once I got NeXTSTEP booting, though, I hit another problem: my boot disk (the 2GB seagate) was dying. So I BuildDisk-ed the 1GB seagate, and tried to boot from it. Success! Out came the dying 2GB, and the 4.5 went inside the Cube, eliminating the external HD cage. I then frogged around with disktab entries, and found one that was pretty good. So, I set up the 4.5G drive, though there's 500MB still unallocated on it. It's now mounted as /home, /var and /LocalApps.
I then decided to try setting the Cube up in dual-headed mode, but that's when I found one of my mono monitors was dead and the other dying, so I gave up on that. I also found that my NeXTSTEP 3.3 Developer CD was scratched! CRAP. Oh, well, I'm proceeding without the developer packages for now. (I have a slab with them installed, can I extract them from here somehow?)
Anyway, I now have a working 040/25 Dimension Cube to compliment my Turbo Color slab and 25MHz turbo-chipset slab (which needs a soundbox and monitor), and my broken mono slab (needs disk, RAM, monitor). This also leaves me with a stray 68030 motherboard, if anyone wants it. I eventually scared up enough RAM to fully populate its slots, but I'm not precisely sure how much that is, since it lacks an NBIC and I have no working mono monitors.
I'm in the process of installing lots of essential software, and trying to get a working dev environment on it somehow, so I can maybe get BIND 9 working, but beyond that it works great. It's on the network, and I can surf with OmniWeb (2.7b, though). (Yes, I tried putting OPENSTEP 4.2 on it, but ecch, slow as dirt. Maybe the slow 2GB disk was to blame though, since NS seemed to speed up drastically once I switched to the 7200RPM 1GB).
Quote from: "kronoman"I acquired a mostly-broken 68030 cube some time ago, and I just got it working, finally.
Good job, "doc" ;) Sometimes a little open-heart surgery is needed!
BTW, the "booting from CD" will only work with certain chipsets/ROMs. Whatever info I found, I've added below, but in short: only Turbo models:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=601and
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=809As for the Dev Tools, I'm not certain if it's enough to copy the /Developer folders :( Maybe try it and see how it goes. Otherwise, since you do own the original, you should be ok "getting a copy"
Quote
As for the Dev Tools, I'm not certain if it's enough to copy the /Developer folders :( Maybe try it and see how it goes. Otherwise, since you do own the original, you should be ok "getting a copy"
Hmm, could I use the bill of materials generated on installation to pull the files into a directory, generate an info file and use /NextAdmin/Installer.app/package to roll up new packages based on them? A bit hacky, perhaps, but...
Quote from: "kronoman"
Hmm, could I use the bill of materials generated on installation to pull the files into a directory, generate an info file and use /NextAdmin/Installer.app/package to roll up new packages based on them? A bit hacky, perhaps, but...
Yes, the receipts/BOM were originated in NeXTSTEP, so you could do it (although instead of creating an installer you could just tar up the files, possibly with an absolute path, and then just untar'em in the new setup). I wouldn't think of it so much as a hack, but rather as painful as lying on a bed of nails :D But then again, we all have different thresholds :) Either way, good luck with whichever method!
Well, I thought of making the packages so that the installation on the Cube would be tracked. This would also make installation on my other two slabs, whenever I fix them, easier. My two Geckos (HPPA) are a bit trickier, since I think only the m68k dev stuff gets installed on Black. But, if I'm wrong, I can use them to fix the HPPAs too.
I think, though I could be wrong, that making up an installer-generator would just be a quick bit of bash/zsh scripting, though. (or csh, but I hate csh and really don't use it anywhere.)
Quote from: "kronoman"Well, I thought of making the packages so that the installation on the Cube would be tracked.
Ah, yeah. Makes sense.
Ditto for csh :)