Installing NextStep OS (OpenStep) in VirtualBox (2018)

You can also emulate a whole NeXT via the Previous emulator: http://previous.unixdude.net/about.html

"previous"ly on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19084769 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745943

And the Previous Forum (not much activity lately): http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php?topic=2642.121...

Silly question though, how do I obtain a NeXT Install iso disk?

https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x https://archive.org/details/Openstep4.2

This is really cool. I never got to play with a proper NeXT machine, but WindowMaker was my window manager of choice for several years in the late 90s/early 2000s. I always wished that GNUStep could have gotten more traction on the desktop.

I love the NeXT aesthetic, I'm ready for the the next UI design trend to go retro.

I wonder if it’s possible given the parties at play to have a retro tech UI trend? I agree it’s sorely needed. So much has been taken away and not given a suitable replacement.

John Gruber recently wrote this: »I miss buttons that look like buttons and clear distinctions between app chrome and content.«

I think we are many who agree.

Source: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/01/20/instagram-for-w...

It's a matter of perspective. The UI many of us use on our Linux desktops (Xfce) has changed very little from what was current in 1995; the most prominent change has been touch readiness forcing bigger widgets and "header bars" compared to a pure mouse+keyboard UI; and even there the biggest effect has been simply to offset the improvement in screen area (from 640x480 or so to 1366x768).

My desktop environment is macOS/Windows but what you describe is IMHO some pretty solid selling points for XFCE.

Take a look at what's happening with the next version of XFCE.

> This is really cool. I never got to play with a proper NeXT machine, but WindowMaker was my window manager of choice for several years in the late 90s/early 2000s.

Same here, and that's even before I knew about the elegance of the underlying software design. (Which amazes me even more, because a lot of the fundamentals of the software were already in shape back when Windows was 2.x and MacOS was known as System 6.)

A company I worked for sent me along with two senior colleagues to a shop which was showing both the NeXT cube and the NeXTStep system ported on x86 hardware, and the experience was totally worth the early morning (late night) wake up plus following 5 hours train trip; it was about 1993 or 1994. The cube was absolutely gorgeous looking, and being then myself an Amiga fan its Motorola CPU to me was something to be proud of. The demonstration wasn't the usual smoke and mirrors wrapped in corporate speech: the guy wrote some code on the cube and built a small GUI program to show the development system and libraries, then he took the same code, copied it to a x86 machine nearby running the ported OS and built it to obtain the same program. Just wow! Back then running different hardware and CPU architectures meant sort of living on a different planet, and we just saw someone building a space bridge between two distant planets, making software development much easier.

We eventually got back with some promo material and the idea that we were did indeed experience a milestone in the IT development, but the price tag was something a very small company could not invest for research alone, so they abandoned the idea.

About WindowMaker: I loved it and used it extensively both at home and work in the early 2k. In one project I had to build the simplest possible user interface for roughly 50 remote stations hundreds of kilometers away where the users were mostly completely new to computers, therefore the risk of clogging the support seat with panic calls was really high. Luckily WindowMaker and its kiosk mode came to rescue: I built a really basic desktop screen in which the user could not alter the system in any way, providing buttons for simple tasks like running a browser, fetch or send mail using a client, ask for remote support, print documents we sent through scp or mail attachments, shutdown/reboot etc. An interesting challenge was easing the support login since all those terminals had dynamic IP, and we simply couldn't ask to the operators to start a reverse ssh from their side, but thanks to some Ruby scripts in the background, each remote machine would obtain and send its public IP and some more information to the local server in which a Ruby+Glade GTK app would add them to a list, so that the support operator would click on a station name and the ssh to that machine would open in seconds. In the end it worked so well that the support colleague spent most of her time twiddling thumbs.

I used WindowMaker for years and liked it too, but to be fair, pretty much all decent WMs of the 1990s could implement a custom menu in the way you describe. It wasn't unique to wmaker.

These days it seems like people are coming up not realizing that X desktops can be anything else than what Ubuntu gives on a default install, as if a full DE is mandatory. They don't know about launching a simple wm from ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc or editing the menus in such a WM.

And let's not forget WindowMaker's daddy, AfterStep.

Let's not forget AfterStep's daddy, bowman.

Touché!

"It wasn't unique to wmaker."

True but I wanted to avoid menus so that users would have immediately the options at hand, and other WMs, most of them at least, didn't allow fixed buttons on the desktop. If I recall there was also a kiosk mode on KDE which was more advanced than WindowMaker's but at that time one would have to double the system RAM just to run KDE without swapping, while Wmaker (as AfterStep before, thanks to another commenter for mentioning it) was much faster and less memory hungry. There was also a less known WM, probably Openbox or a similar named one which could be arranged with a kiosk mode, but turned out to be less stable and less udser friendly, so in the end WindowMaker made the best compromise.

The purpose was essentially to give users a panel with buttons, to avoid those errors most of us would never think as possible but non technical users often do, like losing icons by dropping them into windows they then close, or call a software with the wrong argument by dropping an icon onto another icon, delete them accidentally, clogging the desktop with files, etc. A powerful unrestricted desktop environment in the hands of a non technical user can turn into many otherwise unneeded support calls, so it was necessary in that context.

It doesn't sound like we are discussing it in a "timely" fashion :-) but I seriously bet fvwm would have fit the bill for these requirements.

I recently started to revisit fvwm2 as a sort of retro/nostalgia thing. It was nice.

As someone who used a real NeXT machine, I could never figure out the appeal of window managers like WindowMaker. It's like those Aqua 'themes' for Windows XP. It's superficially similar (more or less) but it's missing the guts. Window managers are an add-on, and consistency isn't something you can get with an add-on.

my wm setup has:

- keyboard shortcut for (horiz|vert|global)-maximizing

- keyboard shortcut for hide app, miniwindow window

- window shading (huge feature)

- middle-click select and alt-move of multiple windows at once (so I can 'click click click 3 windows, alt click and move all 3)

- plus emulate appicon based on window title

this makes grouping windows and managing them much easier than anything else i've found that is still mouse driven

Did you use WindowMaker before or after the redesign? I have a friend who swears by the pre-redesigned version, but the new one seems useless (as it eradicates the global menu).

dockapps were really cool as well.

I used to pair WindowMaker with GNUstep apps, which were written in objc against AppKit APIs and some of them had a nice and consistent feel. The WindowMaker piece was a bit of an odd duck in this though, written in C and essentially being a traditional X WM.

This is a bit of a nirvana fallacy issue. The Next-like window manager family wasn't sold on purely visual merits, and thus even just having the window managers themselves provided some benefit. I don't see that as much in the Aqua-likes, as the functional changes are pretty minimal (scroll-bar buttons on the same side, back when that still was a thing) or even counter-productive (keeping all the window buttons together).

Back when bowman/afterstep/wmaker came out, pretty much no one who used them was familiar with the NeXt interface, beyond having seen one in a magazine or knowing its look-and-feel via Win95 copying some of it.

As far as I can remember, the popularity rested on a few pillars: For one, it's a pretty sleek look compared to twm or mwm. It also had a rather good resize functionality -- big enough handles to grab at the bottom, while saving a few valuable pixels at the sides.

A lot of people also like(d) the dock apps that came with it. Even other window managers adopted them.

Can't say a lot about general dock/shelf usage, as I never got into that.

Window shading was nice and probably introduced into common usage by that family of WMs.

> I always wished that GNUStep could have gotten more traction on the desktop.

GNUStep is just the programming framework, aka AppKit aka Cocoa.

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace where someone tries to recreate the NeXT experience on top of noth GNUStep & Window Maker, both modified to provide coherent experience.

I used these instructions to install on VMWare, although it's pretty similar to the above. It works really well in VMware, including networking. I had to use a static IP as DHCP wasn't working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVCxfoG8bv4

You can download the drivers for VMware graphics, mouse, sound and networking here:

http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Software/NEXTSTEP/Dev...

If anybody wants to try the real thing instead of virtualised, I have two nextstations available for a small fee if you're close to Cambridge, UK.

small fee is for rent or for sale?

how do we contact you?

Sale. Email in profile.

Your email appears not to be visible.

updated.

please contact me via the email in my profile.

(My email is in my profile) I'm trying to offload them, as they're taking up far too much room in my garage.

I can't see it. (Is that because I have lower HN karma than you?)

edit: think it might be because one needs to put it in the "about" box as I have just done.

Updated my bio.

I'd happily buy one but I think shipping to Hong Kong is kinda screwed up right now.

Note that the instructions say you can have either the normal install ISO or the Install-Dev ISO in the optical drive, but this does not seem to be correct -- using the Install-Dev ISO causes an error trying to read /etc/init. You need to use the normal install ISO instead.

This is absolutely correct.

Do you also know how to use the install-dev iso to install the development tools?

mount the install-dev CD and run as root

    /NextAdmin/Installer.app/Installer /OPENSTEP_4.2_DEVELOPER/NextCD/Packages/*.pkg

Thanks!

This is confusing. Which one is correct? The parent or the article.

Install from the INSTALL CD. Once is it installed, install the developer tools from the INSTALL-DEV CD.

I'm surprised we've had several front-page articles in the past few weeks about getting NextStep installed on a VM or on hardware, but nothing on GNUStep, which has standard installers.

GNUStep is a framework for writing applications not a GUI/desktop environment.

This is true. I probably should've clarified that nothing about etoile has reached the front page, which IS more of a desktop environment written in GNUStep:

http://etoileos.com/

But to be fair, the project looks like it's stagnated.

Recent headlines, one in 2014, the rest in 2012.

Does anyone know if there is a copy of WorldWideWeb floating around out there somewhere? Or was it exclusive to TBL's computer?

There's some info about the code at https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/code/ and a github mirror that appears to contain a usable app bundle: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb

Is this what you are searching for? http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/LineMode/Defaults/Distribu...

There is more available at the following website: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

The FTP server at info.cern.ch mentioned in the first link is offline :(

Apologies. I should have tested the ftp server. I did find another source and. I tested the WWWLineMode_x.xx.tar.Z and they worked for me. https://www.w3.org/2016/11/ftp-shutdown/info.html

It was quickly renamed Nexus so you might wind up using it called that.

Last time I tried this, the mouse was so laggy it was impossible to use. I might give it another go at some point tho, maybe even on a mini-iTX motherboard in a cube case ... for that full NeXT experience. :)

The mouse lag is probably because of the lack of guest-additions for the OS. Same thing happens for Windows 3.1 or 9x in VirtualBox.

Very cool -- on a semi-unrelated tangent: I really hope SerenityOS takes off (contributors, supporters), as I've been itching to run some old-looking OS on newer hardware.

OpenBSD works fine on a lot of new hardware :)

Please, please examine closely the license for VirtualBox before using it. It's Oracle, after all.

Uh, unless you're building a money-making venture on it, you're fine.

There is also VirtualBox Open Source Edition that would be fine for this.

Looks more promising and easier to deploy than Rhapsody DR2 installation in VMWare I did once

I have a VM running OS X Server 1.0's kernel & userland rebuilt using DR2 for over 900 days!

[darwin:~] root# uptime 12:34PM up 922 days, 15:02, 2 users, load averages: 2.71, 2.16, 2.03 [darwin:~] root# hostinfo Mach kernel version: Kernel Release 5.5: Sun Apr 30 10:53:53 SGT 2017; root(rcbuilder):kernel-7/BUILD/RELEASE_I386 Copyright (c) 1988-1995,1997-1999 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Kernel configured for a single processor only. 1 processor is physically available. Processor type: pentium (Intel Pentium) Processor active: 0 Primary memory available: 512.00 megabytes. Default processor set: 36 tasks, 61 threads, 1 processors Load average: 2.33, Mach factor: 0.30

It's on VMWare ESXi 5.5 ... It's been surprisingly stable.

That GUI has aged well.