On 05/08/2017 04:16 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
The machine boots into UNIX. You can login as root with no pswd, add or change the password for root or any of the other 4 user accts on the machine. When you logout, it then boots directly into NextStep. Problem was the pswds from UNIX didn't translate to the nextstep login.
Adam found a forum thread that gave the proper procedure for setting the NextStep login and password (since we had root access already it was not difficult once he knew what to do)
Now we just need to figure how to switch the boot process so it loads directly into NextStep instead of having to log into and then out of the command line to get NextStep to boot. It works, we just want it to work with fewer steps now. We simply ran out of time to go further.
If I missed any steps I'm sure Adam will fill them in but that's pretty much where things stand now and roughly how we got there.
Yeah, it is like nothing I have ever seen.
At that level, it's bog-standard 4.3BSD UNIX in nearly every way. (with a MACH kernel underneath, of course)
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.
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. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA