🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello,

I'm a french Unix user/developer/part-time admin living in Paris.
Having worked in an ISP I've been using a few various Unices in the last
years (OSF, Solaris,SunOS,Linux,SCO, OpenBSD and FreeBSD...).

My NeXT story began when I looked for a station from which to monitor my
small home Network (mostly OpenBSD and various Linuxes).

Initialy looking for an old Sun I could not resist the oportunity to buy a
NeXTStation (I had been using NS in university, uses GNUStep on Linux and
some WebObjects so it was very tempting to taste "the original black
flavour").
"After all that's an Unix it should not be that different", I guessed.

The seller was really helpful and a few days later I could carry the black
beast from office to home (Duuuh, heavy thing it is !).

Then began the playing and tweeking. Configuring the network was easy and
quickly I could telnet it and see my network.

Quickly I wanted my GNU utilities, my SSH and the usual stuffs.
I looked around: gcc was installed (old but well ...) so I downloaded bash
shell sources and tried to compile.

Bad move !!
The date was stuck in the 70s in made Make utility become crazy.
Trying to play with the date command and the graphical configuration
utilities did not help.
I looked around (and particulary the very nice site from M. Levenez) and
found out that I probably needed to apply a Y2K patch.
Ok, my OS versions seems to be NS3.3 so lets install Apple third patch. A
few dead links later I was installing the patch with the Installer..

Awfull move !!
loginwindow did not start anymore complaining about insane unfound classes
message and I was let to a very nice but useless grey screen.

I looked around, connected to the machine through telnet, booted single user
mode and explored the /etc directory and a few hours later I could launch
some graphical apps including the Installer. I tried to reinstall the patch
.. it did not help.

Well, the final state of my station is that I now boot in text mode (good
fight with command line to comment without an editor the appropriate line in
/etc/ttys), but cannot use the graphical applications (most of them die
silently on startup or complaining about "not linked classes") and whenever
the station comes back to energy saving mode it crashes (something about a
bad kernel trap).

That's HIGHLY frustrating......

Is it something that someone would know to the cause ?
Since I don't possess the OS cdrom I looked for a NS3.3 Developer but it
seems really expensive (150 USD ? gasp !!).
I'm seriously considering installing NetBSD(seems light and portable enough)
on the beast but I would welcome any help with NS.

My configuration is : B&W NextStation 25Mhz, 400Mb HD, 32Mb RAM

The error I'm stuck on is:
hermes:5# /usr/lib/NextStep/loginwindow
objc: class `LoginView' not linked into application
Unknown View class LoginView in Interface Builder file,
         creating generic View instead

Thanks for any help on my NeXT move (before I post "recovery through black
hardware destruction" on alt.sysadmin.recovery ).

--
Christophe Renard
email : crenard@NOSPAM.meditnet.com

PS: desole pour le crossposting en anglais sur un groupe fran�ais, mais
comme l'histoire est longue ...