Click for a bigger picture.

In fact, the technology is so close that I used a tutorial for developing a sample Mac app, to develop a sample NextStep app. The notion of "FAT Binaries" that work on multiple hardware architectures came from NeXT as well, since it ran on any number of platforms by the end.

When Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, he set out to create a new company that would deliver elite hardware, and a revolutionary operating system. NeXT was started to build powerful hardware and software that would leapfrog the Mac (and everyone else on the market.) They eventually had to kill off the hardware line (after making some very nice, uber-high-end machines) but the software they made changed the industry. It was on a NextStation computer, using the NextStep OS that Tim Berners Lee would invent the World Wide Web, and its the true Object Oriented approach of the OS that many companies have imitated or borrowed.

By the mid-90s Apple was in truly rough shape. Their archaic OS, once the greatest thing on the market, was showing its age, and Apple had tried, and failed (mostly due to mismanagement) to replace it. It was determined that they should buy an existing next-gen OS, and re-build on top of it. After flirting with IBM and BeOS, they settled on a deal with NeXT. A deal that grew until Apple acquired the company, re-acquiring Steve Jobs in the process. He became the iCEO (interim CEO) and the de-facto leader of the company. Existing ideas were rapidly brought over from the Mac onto NextStep/OpenStep, layered on top of its rock-solid BSD Mach microkernel, Object Oriented underpinnings, and a re-vamped version of its graphics layer, was a new Interface, and a Classic emulator to allow old Mac apps to run.

The end product, after many variations, pre-releases, betas, and one or two fairly ugly general releases, was what we know today as Mac OS X. Much of NextStep is still intact, including low-level OS APIs, visual and development concepts, and culture.

If you're interested in getting NextStep up and running in VMWare (I'm using a Windows Vista 64-Bit Host OS, but these steps should work with most versions of VMWare -- including Fusion) you'll need to find an ISO of the NextStep OS somewhere, and maybe these steps will help you...

Configuring VMWare

After much frustration, I finally got past the initial hurdle of configuring it so the installer would run off a CD image. Here's what I had to do:

Get the NextStep 3.3 floppy disc images from this great resource site, nextstepcomputers.org. It has pretty much everything you need, plus some forums that you may or may not find helpful. You're going to need at least:

- Boot Disk
- Driver Disk
- Beta Drivers
- Core Drivers

Configure a new VM, and tell VMWare that the Guest OS will be BSD.

Create a virtual hard drive no larger than 2GB -- and it must be pre-allocated.

64MB of RAM will be more than enough

"Insert" the Boot Disk floppy image (rename the extensions of all the disc images you downloaded to .flp to make VMWare find them easily) and "Insert" the ISO for the Install CD.

Your Hard Drive and CD-ROM should be configured as IDE. The Hard Disk must be configured as IDE 0:0 and the CD-ROM MUST be configured as IDE 1:0 due to the primitive driver support.

Installing NextStep 3.3

Start up the VM, following the prompts until you're asked for driver discs.

Start with the Core Drivers. It'll only need that disk for a second to load keyboard support, and other basics.

When asked for SCSI drivers, first use the "3.3 Driver Disk" and tell it to use option 4 -- Adaptec 2940. This isn't really present on your VM (no configuration in VMWare will let you use the SCSI drivers) but we just need to make the installer get past this step.

You'll be asked a second time for SCSI drivers. I assume the first time is about the CD-ROM, and the second time is about the hard drive. In any case, this is the important driver. Insert the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc, and press 1 to list its drivers. Press 7 to go to the next page, and press 2 to choose "Dual IDE" option.

Finally press 1 to skip loading any other drivers, and continue...

The installer will ask a whole bunch of times if you really want to wipe out your hard drive (just the hard drive image, don't worry!) and then it'll copy the files it needs. When its done, it'll ask you to remove (disconnect) the floppy and reboot.

The OS will begin to load, and then notice it needs some drivers again. It'll list the devices it doesn't know about on its own. Supply the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc, and then the "3.3 Core Drivers" disc to continue...

Soon you'll see the Graphical OS Loader kick-in...

It'll take a few minutes and then it'll want the "3.3 Beta Drivers" disc again. At this point you should have mouse support, so things get a little nicer. Following that, it'll want the "3.3 Core Drivers" disc again too.

You'll see the famous beach ball from OS X (but in grayscale instead of color) and then a Summary of Devices.

Just to start out, I clicked on Monitors and added the Default VGA Adapter. I'll have to mess with this, and what's available online. I've heard its possible to get a much better resolution than VGA.

The mouse was working, so I didn't mess with that. Network is another whole ball of wax (apparently DHCP support needs to be hacked in) so I skipped over this for now.

In sound, I added Sound Blaster 16, since that used to be very compatible. I don't know if it'll work, but its worth a try. I didn't touch the SCSI or Hard Drive drivers, since the ones I was using got me this far!

In the next step, I unchecked the languages I didn't want, and installed everything else so I could play with it. It struck me that much of the terminology used in the installer looked similar to that used in the OS X installer.

When its done copying, remove the floppy (like it tells you to!) and go ahead and reboot.

Pretty soon you'll be up and running inside NextStep! Check your e-mail -- there's a note there from our old friend Steve!
I have had some mouse problems -- it behaves erractically, so I'll be searching the forums for fixes on that. I found that if I hit "Ctrl + Alt" to release the mouse, then click inside NexStep again to send control back to the Guest OS, that clears up the problem... for a bit. Obviously I'll be working on display and network drivers, but thats outside of the scope of this article. It's alive, and that's all we were after today.

From here I'm going to point you to a couple links that should help you finish up a good install. I've also made a drivers ISO that will simplify things greatly.

• More technical information and advice,
• Custom drivers by a guy on the scene that fix things like the mouse (which will get progressively worse with each reboot!)
• Custom NextStep/VMWare video drivers for higher resolutions and color!
• A pre-made disc full of all of these NextStep custom drivers.
• How to copy files onto your NextStep VM (harder than it sounds!)
• How to set-up networking on NextStep (once the custom drivers are installed)

Enjoy your bit of Apple/technology nostalgia...

According to the Connect360 Support website, you can't use Connect360 on your Mac to connect to your XBox 360 if your network uses a Linksys WRT54g with homebrew firmware on it. They're right -- it doesn't work.

The solution is pretty simple, however. Abstract the Mac and the XBox from the router using a good* network switch. The switch will allow the two devices to communicate (via broadcast) with each other without having to go through the router, and all will work as expected.

*Note: The Connect360 site also warns that some switches may cause a similar problem. I'm using a NetGear Gigabit Switch to accomplish this, and it works perfectly. YMMV.

Step 1: Open Terminal
Usually found in the Utilities folder of Applications (but if you didn't know that already, this might not be the right topic for you!)

Step 2: Create your public/private key pair on your local computer

• At the command prompt type: ssh-keygen -t rsa
• Hit enter to accept the default file name and location

Step 3: Copy your public key contents into the "authorized_keys2" file on the remote server

• Type: ssh username@remoteserver.com 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2' < /Users/Youruser/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
• Enter your FTP password for the remote server when prompted
  • If the file didn't already exist on the remote server, it will be created, don't worry.

Step 4: SSH at will!
You will never need a password from your account on your local computer again! Note that you'll need a public key provided for each client computer/computer account you want to use to connect to the server.

Media Synchronization

My uber-script runs at 1:00am on the iMac. It starts by cleaning out the downloads folder, deleting any downloaded TV shows over 21 days old, then moves any downloaded music into the appropriate folder and adds it to the local iTunes library. Then it gets really clever, and logs into the remote Home Theater Mac over SSH and begins sending it instructions. It shuts down the remote iTunes, deletes its Library (which is a data island, because we do all our media maintenance on the iMac) and copies over the iMac’s iTunes Library. Note that it copies the Library only — the music remains on a network share that both computers have access to.
Then, once both iTunes are in sync, it starts up the remote iTunes which triggers a sync with my iPhone, getting me a playlist of my most recent music, plus my favorites (I only have a 4GB so I have to manage well) and does something similar locally to sync Nic’s iPod.

Both computers use the network shared Videos folder to populate FrontRow with our movies and TV content.

Calendar Synchronization

I failed to get WebDAV up and running on my new host, and Symlinks didn’t work out. But a wonderful and free service called iCalX came to the rescue. Microsoft finally added WebDAV publishing to Outlook 2007, so I publish my work calendar from there, my personal calendar syncs from my iPhone with the Home Theater Mac and from there to iCalX, and Nic publishes her calendar from the iMac. Any WebDAV client can subscribe to them and iCalX provides a nice little PHP iCalendar view online.

Address Book Synchronization

The OS X Address Book doesn’t complain too much about sharing its library between two computers, and provides little other utility for syncing or sharing (unless you want to pay $99 a year for .Mac — an otherwise useless service). I explored lots of options, but the only unattended one is Exchange syncing (or Kerio), and I don’t want to run a mail server any more. So I finally just decided to let Address Book share. The only caveat is that to make sure Address Book’s on multiple machines match up you have to quit Address Book to dump its in-memory cache and force it to re-read the database. It was easy enough to add some quit, open and hide commands to my uber-script, and that seems to solve the problem. Putting those commands in before each iTunes syncs with its connected portable device makes sure that both the iPhone and iPod have the latest contacts.

Nic’s cell phone is still a non-Apple device, but it syncs nicely over Bluetooth. A little app called Proximity detects when she comes into range of the Home Theater Mac, and fires a tiny AppleScript that does an automatic sync for her. A little blue light on her phone is the only indicator that its even happening.

Document Backup

This is actually another potentially useful service of .Mac, but I’m too cheap to be sold that easily. A really nice online service called Mozy provides free back-ups up to 2GB, and unlimited back-up for $5 a month (sign-up with that link and get me more free space!) We just eeked in under the 2GB mark backing up all our documents. This happens automatically every Sunday night at 1:00am, in place of the usual media sync.
I’ll be taking a semi-annual physical back-up of our document, music and pictures — pictures are copied between both Macs anyway. I have yet to figure out a way to back up 280GB of videos, save for having a second hard drive stored elsewhere, but I think, in case of a fire, we can live with only losing our movie collection.

Cleaning up

After either scheduled task (media sync or back-up, depending on the night of the week) the iMac goes to sleep until 9:00am, or until called for, while the Home Theater Mac studiously downloads things it thinks we might want to watch.

My script is likely pretty unique to our set-up, but I had to search long and hard to find the various parts that make it work — sending script instructions to a remote Mac over SSH was particularly tricky — so I’m posting it here for anyone who’s interested in picking it apart.

• Download the Uberscript here!
  

One other thing to be aware of, much of the script works against a shared drive, so it needs to be mounted for this to work. I use a little app called Automount Maker to get my media share to mount on boot, but its possible for the volume to get dismounted during the day (our microwave interferes with our wireless, for example, because there are so many wireless networks around, and that can kill the connection). I’d love to hear any ideas on how to make sure a volume stays mounted!