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Stuttgart museum purchases 40 NeXT machines from Rob Blessin

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#91
Virtualization / Re: What Needs to be done for ...
Last post by wmlive - Mar 03, 2026, 11:02 PM
The Previous packages at wmlive.rumbero.org/repo/pool/main/p/previous/ have been updated to version 4.1-r1777.
The binary packages were built for target release Debian/Trixie and CPU architectures i386, amd64, and arm64.
#92
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:24 AM
Lastly (for the first batch), vertical gradients. They don't look very good in thumbnails, but they add a nice unobtrusive verve to the background.gradually-preview.png
It appears I have no idea how to play pool.
#93
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:22 AM
Tiling hieroglyphs! Since this is possibly the CDE wallpaper, it was imperative we get a nicer one. Available in Ohlfs Silver #2 and Cobalt Poisoning. (The stone texture comes from Uru, the short-lived online Myst game.)

hiero-preview.png
#94
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:21 AM
Mazes. The actual thing that got me inspired to do this was a half-baked vibe-coded pseudo-CDE desktop-in-a-browser thing that made the rounds on r/osdev. It had a funky maze wallpaper. This is not exactly it, but it's not too far off...

mazes-preview.png
#95
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:20 AM
NeXT soup! Inspired by the kinetic typography on Paul Rand's logo pamphlet, and also the tradition of Memphis "confetti" textures.

soup-preview.png
#96
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:18 AM
Some embossed perlin noise, ideal for making a simple rock surface. Photoshop is too "advanced" to produce the emboss effect required—its Bas Relief filter adds an annoying gradient—so I actually had to whip out TIFFany II for these ones.

rock-preview.png
#97
Software / Re: Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:17 AM
The cube series: based on binarized images of a NeXTcube motherboard.

cube-preview.png
#98
Software / Tiling Wallpaper Project
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 03, 2026, 01:16 AM
A few days ago I decided I was envious of these. It's patently unfair that CDE got all these nifty chunky low-color wallpaper images and NeXT didn't. Surely, the multimedia machine of all time should have some nice pixels on it. So, some tinkering later, and I have the first batch to show off. Behold!

Attached: a ZIP containing all the images I've made so far. Subsequent posts: gallery of blingery.

For most of these I only bothered making a #557 ("NeXT blue") version, to recall the default NeXT desktop color, but feel free to request or concoct other hues. :)

MIT-licensed.
#99
Software / Re: GNUstepOfficial meeting mi...
Last post by Rhetorica - Mar 02, 2026, 09:14 PM
The back half of the Valentine's Day meeting was mostly housekeeping. GhostBSD has a Gershwin spin, and a developer from the GhostBSD team, Brian (probably brianthehughs) showed up in text to spectate, and will likely participate more fully in the next meeting.

Fred Kiefer popped in to admonish Gregory for committing an experiment with an LLM (a commit on NSDiffableDatasource that evidently functioned but had horrible code) to the GitHub project. This was not pleasant code to review. They resolved to be much more reserved about playing with AI coding in the future, particularly considering the general weakness around Objective-C specifically. Gregory noted a number of systematic errors.

More generally, Greg proposed restricting commits to the master branch in favor of a pure PR model; Fred felt it was perhaps excessive; Lars and Joe were on the fence. (It seems only Gregory understood what it actually entails—it's definitely a good idea. Hopefully they come around to it eventually.)

Afterward the conversation moved to a recent merge that changed menu behavior—it removed the ability to open a menu by simply clicking it (requiring the button to be held down), which is a pretty annoying thing on a trackpad. Fred mentioned that edit wars (people repeatedly submitting "fixes" to make the OS behave the way they wanted) were a real concern back in GNUstep's early days, and acknowledged that PRs would be a good way to fix it. Since the committer has been hard to reach, they're thinking of just reverting it for now—possibly quarantining it in its own branch—and dealing with it if the person responsible resurfaces. This annoying tweak has been in GNUstep for about a year, but Gershwin's devs had been insulated from it because they were using forks of the libraries in question. (It's probably in the latest versions of @wmlive, to be honest...)

There wasn't much else beyond that—just miscellaneous housekeeping and something mysterious about menus being shifted upward by 1 pixel under the Windows skin. Until next time!
#100
General Discussion / Re: Lisa UI
Last post by ZombiePhysicist - Mar 02, 2026, 08:33 PM
Funny. It worked well for me. I think there may have been an earlier version than Openstep, like even NS3.3. It was super solid on the local machine, and that alone made it valuable. I recall it worked well on a local LAN between two next machines too.

I never tried the internet version because a) not sure that was fully baked beyond demos, and b) i had SLIP dialup back then so you know, not exactly great use case and a lot of other next's to collaborate with. 

But I also remember the openstep for windows betas. And I think I tried an early version on some NT build. It worked shockingly well in some limited cases/apps. But clearly also not ready for prime time, at least the early version i had. I forget where I got that from. I might have a physical disc in some box somewhere. I have yet to go through all my non-backed up physical media as that's a true software archeology project.

Anyway, I do remember using DO (distributed objects) regularly myself between apps. It was fantastic for creating shared header/footers and boilerplate as a pretty sophisticated dynamic templating. And it meant if you had an address change etc, everything just got updated by updating one master link. But again, that was mostly on my local machine, but if I recall, it worked well on LANs internally at NeXT too.