Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Parallels and OpenStep: success!

Just turn off VT-x extensions for the host CPU in the VM's configuration (you'll find this switch in Options -> VM Flags -> Emulation Flags).  Now the system boots fully, in any of the VESA modes that I've tried :-)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any chance you will be documenting the install process and providing the necessary drivers and converted startup floppy disks as a download, I have Openstep 4.2 and would alos like to get this runnig under Paralles

Anonymous said...

Very cool stuff! I've tried OpenStep with VMWare and could never get around the jumping mouse problem. Let us know what the performance is like...

Graham Lee said...

Alan: yes, as soon as I've finished tweaking things around I intend to write up an install process. I won't offer modified OpenStep media due to potential licensing problems (I don't yet know where Apple Legal would stand on that), but I've made a floppy containing the NE2k driver which will be available shortly.

Anon: Never seen the 'jumping mouse' in parallels under betas 1-3 so I don't think you'd be disappointed. The only apps I've tried 'in anger' are FrameMaker and Quantrix, both of which are, to use a technical phrase, mad fast ;-)

Anonymous said...

Just how did you create the floppy images. I have all the images from Apples web site downloaded. They have the extension .floppyimage. Yours have .fdd? Is there some utility that can create these? Preferably in OS X, but I'll do windows if that is what it takes.

Thanks
Mike Jackson
mike [at] bluequartz [dot] net

Graham Lee said...

Mike: I expect if you rename the images to .fdd they'll work. I did nothing 'magic' in creating disk images; I simply used dd on a Linux box:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=openstep_boot.fdd

Anonymous said...

To anonymous: Jens Heise has a driver to correct the "mad vmWare mouse" problem. Also a working sound & networking driver. I am submitting pointers to this and other info on installing NextStep/OpenStep on a variety of emulators to www.nextcomputers.org in the next couple of days.

But I will not cover Parallels Workstation, as I don't have to access to that. I will, at least for now, include a link to this blog, unless I receive an objection from its owner.

Graham Lee said...

Tomaž: of course I don't mind you linking. What are the details of the VMWare sound driver? Is it AC'97-based?

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I have put a link to your blog in my guide.

vmWare emulated sound hardware is Ensoniq ES1371, and so the driver is for that HW, not sure how that relates to the Realtek hardware.

The driver is at

http://mitglied.lycos.de/Morgon_de/downloads/SoundBlaster16PCI-1.0.I.bs.tar.gz

By the way, I've included a speed comparison in my guide of Parallels vs. vmWare (both running on a PC/Windows XP). It seems that Parallels has a faster display, but vmWare has faster disk I/O and networking. CPU emulations seems to be about equal. But that's on the basis of only some basic benchmarks.

The guide I have prepared is work in progress, aiming to gather together all useful information about running NextStep/OpenStep (and hopefully, later, Rhapsody) on emulators in a single place, so I'm looking for feedback, especially if you can find something that's missing or can be improved!