Newish Intel OPENSTEP 4.2 box

verdraith · February 02, 2023, 01:34:16 AM

Mate, you should see what I did for the window resize test... though, for it to be apparent you'd need to run it on an m68k, so I guess I'll post a screenshot

Nitro · February 02, 2023, 05:11:36 AM

Quote from: verdraith on February 02, 2023, 01:34:16 AMMate, you should see what I did for the window resize test... though, for it to be apparent you'd need to run it on an m68k, so I guess I'll post a screenshot

Very nice! All this talk about burning cubes is getting around.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/01/31/do-magnesium-next-cube-cases-burn-nextcomputer/

Nitro · February 18, 2023, 02:05:07 PM

I just finished building three more newish Intel boxes, so I'll have a write-up on those as time permits. I no longer think that this first newish box has any stability issues, as one of the two benchmarks that wouldn't run also had issues on the other boxes. The second benchmark seemed to go crazy just on this box when I adjusted one of the SCSI settings on the Adaptec controller. The other boxes use SATA drives so they didn't exhibit that behavior. I have a new CPU for testing, and I believe it's one of the final P4 single core processor models that Intel manufactured. We'll see how that CPU runs in this board. I also had fun setting up OPENSTEP on some SATA SSD drives running in IDE mode, and they're fast and quiet. One of the newish machines is a P4 mini-ITX box. It was a challenge to shoehorn everything into a small PC case. I'll have more details on that soon.

mickenx · March 07, 2023, 09:05:06 AM

Just wanted to say thankyou. I found this thread and went for GT 710 -> 1080p.
It only works on a 1080p display, with my 4k monitor I only get the standard modes, up to 1280x1024.

pTeK · April 28, 2023, 10:09:05 PM

Hi.

How do you install this? Do you /bin/dd the hd image to the hard drive or do you boot of a USB floppy before it boots of the CD-ROM?

Regards

pTek

Nitro · April 29, 2023, 01:19:11 AM

An easy way to set up an IDE drive is to build one from a running patched machine. If you don't have a NS/OS patched machine you can build one with an old PC that has a standard floppy drive. Another option is to build a bootable CD if your old PC doesn't have a floppy drive. Then install the OS onto a 2GB or smaller drive and patch the system with the latest patches.

Now you can build IDE drives from that machine by connecting a new drive to it and using a disktab to set up the BSD slices and the file system. Then you can dump/restore the patched OS from the old PC's boot drive to the new IDE drive. This is just one way of doing it.

There are different ways to set up the drive depending on whether you use DOS style partitions or BSD slices, the number of partitions, dual boot or not, etc. I posted some info on setting up a dual boot IDE SSD at the bottom of this post. I hope that helps you out.

pTeK · April 29, 2023, 03:11:02 PM

Thank you Nitro, I had that CD webpage as one of my bookmarks. Are you burning that CD.iso to USB because I read that a lot of the BIOS that allows bootable USBs, if you /bin/dd the install.iso to a USB stick then the machine will install of that? It's getting a lot harder to buy blank CDs this decade compared to 10 years ago but that is progress.

I'll try this afternoon with bootable CD to ISO.

I've been trying to be careful with my virtual builds of OpenStep in case I need to write it to a hard drive and I've set it to drivers which aren't detected by my Dell Inspiron 5150 Laptop. My ATI graphics card will hopefully be able to fall back on to VESA or in worse case VGA @ 640x480.

Nitro · April 29, 2023, 04:20:09 PM

I've always run NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP on hardware that has a floppy drive, so I haven't had a chance to try the bootable CD that @pitz created. I also haven't tried booting off of USB for NS/OS installations; although I've used Rufus to convert ISO's to bootable USB drives for Linux installations.