Installing Copland

It crashes if I even think about it. Windows redrawing slows to a crawl and then the Finder craps out. Word is that taking screenshots has this effect but that's what I'm trying to do at this early stage. I think having the debugger helps to a degree but it's painfully slow right now. However it does stay up so-to-speak. I tried without the debugger attached but it won't boot without it. I've added a couple of new pics of it in its current crashed state.

That crash ended up corrupting the hard disk so I have to wipe and reinstall. Work resumes tomorrow but here's the last pic I managed to dump. Love the System Folder icon.

Day 2...

After doing a fresh install I can boot into it without having the debugger attached. Now it runs just as smooth as 7.5.x etc. I guess using the bare-minimum 68k machine for debugging wasn't such a good idea alright. It runs pretty well but will freeze up after taking a screenshot, requiring a reset. I checked out the 3 apps in the Mac OS 8 Applications folder. Monitors is much like the regular CP. But GXSlidemaster is pretty neat. It seems to be a QuickDraw GX-powered slideshow program. I've included some snaps taken of it in action.

I'm also using the animated "Gizmo" theme (called "Z Theme" here). There's no control panel to change appearance, so you have to rename it to "Default Theme" to activate it. I tried putting in the "Hi Tech" theme from 8.2 but it froze up before it could load the desktop.

I tried a few standard Mac OS apps. Apple Video Player locked up the system. Apple CD Player couldn't find a cdrom drive (and the system will fail early into boot if there's a cd in the drive). Fetch ran but I didn't have TCP/IP set up to see if it could connect. Stuffit Expander ran but when I tried to open the preferences it locked up the system.

And now it's screenie time:

Desktop again (showing Input Menu)

GXSlidemaster (now using the "Z Theme")

GXSlidemaster debug menu

GXSlidemaster "Perspected View"

GXSlidemaster "Rotated View"

Using this OS is highly illogical, Captain

The ResEdit 3 developer build is a native Copland app. Here we can see how Copland's nested (aka messy) file dialog boxes looked

Shaky cellphone-cam footage of GXSlidemaster in action (up to when it locks up the system)

I've tried hooking up my 5400 as debug machine but for some reason the debugger just doesn't kick in. I'm about to wipe and try D7E1...

I don't think D7E1 is going to work here. Holding down Caps Lock on startup just boots into the regular Mac OS. There are two versions of a modified System file that need to be copied across to the "host" Mac OS. One is for 7.1.2 and the other 7.5. As the 7500 needs 7.5.2 as a minimum to boot I can't use either.

Here's two more pics just to wrap things up:

Japanese text input, popup Finder window and column view

Find is disabled (I can't find this extension to enable it)

You can try out the much more usable MacOS betas called 7.7.

They are a continuation of 7.6 at the time they stopped Copland and

have almost the same UI look.

A small part of Copland source got into Darwin I already wrote about that.

Anything further to report on this?

That's as far as I went with it. It crashes too much to spend any significant time in it. I get the feeling that builds closer to D11E4 may have been more stable but we only have these two. D7E1 seems to require a PDM-based Mac and I haven't seen any x100 PowerMacs in my "area". If I ever manage to get one I'll try D7E1 on it.

Really wish we could get some more Copland builds though. They must be out there somewhere.

A very workable build of Copland does exist. Just watch this video of the actual Copland in action on the tv show Computer Chronicles back in 95 (at very beginning of video)

Watch it closely. It's clearly just a multimedia demo. The Apple guy is just hitting a key to advance it along. He isn't even using the mouse.

Hmmm just noticed that after watching it again... I heard there's a dp4 build that exists, that usable though.