I’ll be setting my system up on a Windows machine, but you could just as easily set it up on a macOS or Linux machine. When I first attempted this install, I used VMware Workstation 14 Pro for Windows. After going through most of the installation process I couldn’t get OpenStep in to a color screen mode no matter how much I tried. I eventually found out that VMware Workstation doesn’t support the proper VESA display modes, and try as you might you’ll get an error on boot that says “VESA Mode Not Supported.” Fortunately, Virtual Box – which is cross-platform between Windows, macOS, and Linux and completely free – does support the proper VESA mode and works great for the installation of OpenStep.
Still, there are some quirks when setting up your VirtualBox VM initially. The VM must have 1 processor with 1 core, 64MB of RAM, and a 2.0GB hard disk on an IDE controller. You will need to configure one IDE CD-ROM drive and one floppy drive. The hard drive must be at IDE 0:0 (Primary Master), and the CD-ROM drive must be at IDE 0:1 (Primary Slave). You will have to edit the properties of the VM upon creation to ensure you adhere to these standards. All other default options of the VM during the creation wizard can be left alone.
NextStep is a lot of fun to explore and play around with, since you can clearly see the early days of Mac OS X in there, for obvious reasons. It’s definitely worth it to set an evening apart and follow this tutorial.
It is weird how GNUstep is still working on emulating something that had its last stable release 23 years ago.
They’re not. They already support many MacOS features and move the target up every few year to more recent MacOS releases.
If you’re talking about the theme, there are ways to make it look more like modern MacOS.
Alternatively, you can emulate a NeXT Cube or NeXT Stationand its peripherals, using the Previous emulator. Only old builds are available (0.5, released who knows how long ago). Current version is 2.2, but you can find a 2.0 win32 build here.
If you haven’t been to Virtually Fun, you should check it out.
As pointed out in the link above, Qemu also supports Darwin 0.3 & 1.0, as well as Rhapsody DR2, if you’re interested in what happened between NextStep and OpenStep, and the release of MacOS X 10.0 (aka Cheetah)
And as another view of what OSX Could’ve been – a very Mac-like true Unix operating system (SVR4 I think?), the Shoebill emulator is built to run A/UX, but that is from long before the OSX days – A/UX ran on M68k-based Quadras
I’m curious if anyone has had success with any of the NextStep family on QEMU/KVM.
I had moderate success with OpenStep 4.2 and Rhapsody DR2 on VirtualBox in the past, but I’ve been trying to switch from VirtualBox to virt-manager to avoid dealing with the OOB kernel modules, Oracle proprietary extensions, etc.
I haven’t had as much luck getting odd retro OSes working under QEMU/KVM, so far I think because the selection of virtual devices is less suitable for things that think it’s still the 90s. Last time I tried OpenStep with qemu the SCSI virtual devices always did something breakingly unexpected part way through the install.
I wrote a post with a number of links to instructions on getting NextStep/Rhapsody/Darwin 0.3 running on QEMU, but sadly my post is still awaiting moderation.
It is possible. The “Fun with Virtualization” blog has info, as well as more recent builds of Previous, the Next Cube and NextStation emulator.
Drumhellar,
I get this too. It’s silly that wordpress auto flags posts from longtime users like us. Frankly accounts that are several years old and haven’t spammed yet don’t need to be moderated. If nothing else, maybe osnews could delegate some of this trivial spam moderation to users?
While we’re at it, is anyone else experiencing brief but recurring connectivity issues with osnews? I’ve brought this up before – It doesn’t happen too often but regularly enough that I don’t think it’s a transient problem. It could be a DNS issue. osnews staff: Let me know if you want help tracking it down.