[SPARCbook] Nextstep 3.3 on Sparcbook - Any hope ?

[Peter Soderholm]

Hello everybody !

I have been playing around with Nextstep for a bit on my Sparc 20. Its =
quite a nice OS with many nice GUI features.
Just for fun I put the CD in the CD player and tried to install it on my =
Sparcbook. I have  this experimental drive now
with 810 M that I can play around with while keeping my neatly set up =
Solaris system on my 2G drive.

Surprisingly everything went pretty smootly with the installation except =
that when it rebooted it couldnt find a frame buffer driver
of course. I had expected it to crash pretty quickly, but since the =
Sparcbook is essentially a Sparcstation 5, and that machine is supported =
by NS maybe its not so surprising.

Since there seem to be mainly the framebuffer that is the cuplrit to =
making NS run on the Sparcbook, at least a litle, is there
any way conceivable to fool it to use a sun (Tadpole) framebuffer driver =
somehow. Or does anyone know of a third party driver
that ca be had somewhere.=20

On some website it was mentioned that the RDI powerlite laptop was =
supported by Nextstep 3.3. (This maybe a reason to pick one up if one =
could get it cheaply, although I supspect that the smallish screen might =
not be that inspiring to work with.)
Does anyone know if Tadpole ever had any support fro Nextstep?

I also tried OpenBSD 2.6 on the experimental drive but it wouldn't boot. =
Which version of Open works on the Sparcbook?
Should I get 2.7?=20

Thanks for any thoughts on this..

Peter