Help with NeXTStep Objectware CD

[Dog Cow]

I have had a NEXTSTEP 3.3 Objectware Summer 1995 CD for quite some time now, but have never been able to read it. Just last evening I popped it into the optical drive on the Mac mini and typed

cat disk2s1 > /NEXTSTEP_3.3_Objectware_Summer1995.raw

Looking over the raw "disk image" I could find some ASCII text and other things, so I know that the CD is readable. The problem is the format. Does anyone know what format this NeXT CD is in, and if I could read it on OS X?

 

[protocol7]

It's in UFS format. You need to download and compile ancientfs for MacFUSE.

http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1901

I was having some trouble myself there so one of the users posted a pre-compiled binary of ufs which works fine (you need to have MacFUSE installed btw).

If you use the pre-compiled ufs binary here's how to mount the disk image:

mkdir /Volumes/NeXTCD

ufs --type nextstep-cd --dmg NEXTSTEP_3.3_Objectware_Summer1995.raw /Volumes/NeXTCD

 

[Dog Cow]

Thank you! I will try that out this evening!

 

[protocol7]

You can also mount the CD directly. You'll probably get an error when you put it in saying that the format isn't supported. Ignore the error and open Disk Utility. Select the CD and click on the Info button to get the Disk Identifier (disk1s0 in my case). Then use it in place of the disk image filename:

mkdir /Volumes/NeXTCD

ufs --type nextstep-cd --dmg /dev/disk1s0 /Volumes/NeXTCD

 

[Dog Cow]

Do I need root privileges to mount volumes in OS X?

 

[protocol7]

I don't think so. I didn't need to use sudo for either command.

 

[Dog Cow]

OK, I just asked because I read a tutorial on how to mount volumes using the command line, and it mentioned the use of the sudo command, or being root.

I've always said: as long as I can mount my flash drive, have Lynx, and an email/newsreader, then I don't ever have to use a GUI ever again. :lol:

 

[protocol7]

I've never been all that comfortable with the CLI. But I persist

Also, using --type 44bsd you can mount OS X Server discs (no joy with the Rhapsody dev releases alas) and I think the early OS X Developer Releases too. For fun I mounted one of these and extracted the startupimage.img from BlueBox.pkg with Pacifist and booted it in SheepShaver.

Yeah I'm easily amused....

 

[Dog Cow]

Oh, that sounds amusing. I have the Rhapsody DR 2 image, but I haven't looked at it yet. Not enough time for me to mess around with all of this stuff!

 

[Dog Cow]

Success! I was able to get it mounted! Thank you very much, I have been wondering what's on that CD for years!

As reward, here's the raw disk image for anyone who's interested: http://dserver.macgui.com/NEXTSTEP_3.3_Objectware_Summer1995.raw.gz

It is 414.6 MB compressed, 520.6 MB uncompressed. Grab it while you can.

 

[protocol7]

Great! Did you compile it yourself or just use the binary? I was able to get most of the binaries compiled here (Tiger PPC) with some code edits but I couldn't get anything in the ancientfs folder compiled (and I really wanted dump compiled so I could look through some old NeXT dump images).

I'll gladly take this Objectware disc. Curious to see what's on it

 

[Dog Cow]

Great! Did you compile it yourself or just use the binary?

Binary. Since it was already made and quicker, I just decided to use it.

 

[protocol7]

Has anyone used ancientfs to mount a A/UX install CD? I'd like to get into the A/UX session but I haven't had any success so far. Also as I'm trying on an Intel mac (as I still can't get it to compile on my Tiger iBook) I'm wondering if I'm running into endian issues? Or is the HFS partition on the disc screwing things up?