Joone Blog

Installing OpenStep 4.2 on Parallels

Posted on Sep 20, 2017

NextStep is one of the advanced operating systems in 90s. You may understand why it is by watching this video:

Every features Steve Jobs introduced in this video was possible in 1992, which is amazing. So I’ve dreamed of using NextStep since I was aware of it, but I’ve never seen a running demo and just saw a NexTCube. By chance, I found instructions how to install OpenStep 4.2 on Parallels. Finally, NexStep(OpenStep4.2) started running on my machine. o/

If you want to run OpenStep 4.2, follow this instruction. The only problem is that network doesn’t work so it needs to install a network driver. I found the solution by googling, but the link of NE2000 disk image(http://www-teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk/NextStep/NE2K_driver.fdd)) was broken. Fortunately, I was able to recover the link from https://archive.org/ so you can download it.

Network setting:

  1. Install the NE2K driver;
  2. Shut down. Under Boot Order, make sure the hard drive is the first device, and add “devices.net.force_adapter_type=rtl”; in the boot flags.

  1. Set the shared network. Reboot.
  2. Open HostManager.app. Under Local choose “use local domain only”.

  1. Assigned one of available IPs in your local network. Let the machine Reboot;
  2. Add a name server in /etc/resolv.conf

Installing developer tools: there is a good video on Youtube:

The next step is to write some Objective-C code with this book and download some applications from http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/

References: