On 5/8/2017 6:39 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
It boots into what looks like single user mode (# prompt). All attempts to find a command to start the NeXTStep GUI failed (ala startx) and no help could be found on any forums. Eventually, on a lark, I tried typing login... which asked for a username.
That is in fact the single-user mode shell. The reason "startx" didn't work is that NeXTSTEP's GUI isn't X. Typing "login" will run /bin/login, which is a standard UNIX component which gets spawned attached to a tty (physical or pseudo) to process a login. That's not at all what you wanted to do there.
Yeah, I knew it wasn't startx, but this still begs the question of what *do* you type to go in the NeXTStep GUI?
OK, we're home free, I thought. So I type in root and it logs me in as root (without a password).. to the command line. Doh! Foiled again! I then type exit to get back where I was and oddly the GUI boots.
That's expected behavior from /bin/login.
So the act of *exiting* the login starts the NeXTStep GUI. Leaving me rather perplexed about how to automate booting straight into NeXTStep.
The end action that happened there was that you exited single-user mode, and normal system startup picked up from there.
One of the biggest NeXTisms is that it uses netinfo, which is pure bletcherous vomit and one of the worst ideas to ever hit the UNIX world, to manage what is normally on any civilized system a bunch of simple, foolproof, reliable text files. You have to dump out the passwd database from netinfo (if memory serves, "nidump passwd .") redirecting it to a file, edit that file to fix whatever is needed, and then load it back into netinfo with "niload passwd .", taking redirected input from the edited file.
Apple was stupid enough to carry netinfo through into MacOS X, but they wised up and ditched it as of 10.5. But man did it cause pain up until that point.
Yep, I left out the part where I read way too much information about netinfo. I happily missed that era of Mac OS X. ;) I don't have the machine to test, but it sounds like you are telling me that just typing exit should get it to go into NeXTStep and the login was incidental. Which makes sense to me. But this still leaves the question of how to get it to automatically boot into NeXTStep. Thanks, -Adam