I've got the X11 version of Basilisk running within the MacOS X (10.6.8) environment. (I've run the Aqua-GUI version but it crashes if you so much as look at it sideways and when it does it eats the virtual hard drive until I mount it in the X11 version while booting from a different startup disk). The X11 Basilisk is quite stable for me in comparison.

The one thing I do like about the Aqua-GUI version is that in one of the brief spates when I had it up & running, I was actually online with it. I'd like to attain that with the X11 version as well. I gather that I need to go find (build?) something called sheep_net and then put it at /dev/sheep_net ... can I download a version of sheep_net that will execute properly for the x11 environment on MacOSX? Or, failing that, is there a guide (for the complete idiot, with instructions like "now hit Enter after you've typed that") for compiling it from source code? (I have fink & FinkCommander, that's how I got BII for X11).

Any reason why you use the X11 version in OSX 10.6.8 while there is a perfectly stable build for OSX 10.6 and 10.7 available in this forum that will get you online fine?

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361

(When you mention "the Aqua-GUI version", do you refer to Nigel Pearson's port?)

The Aqua / MacOS-native port of Basilisk (Basilisk II 1.0, Mac OS X port 19, downloaded from here), 99% of the time, launches, shows smiling Mac, the blue MacOS screen, march of icons as extensions and control panels load, Desktop background loads, then *spoop*, window closes, Basilisk crashes, and that hard disk image is rendered unbootable.


(I can fix the hard disk image by booting either the X11 version of BasiliskII or booting SheepShaver, from a totally different hard disk .img file in either case, and edit the prefs to include the beforementioned crashed Basilisk startup disk as an extra disk to also mount. Once it has been mounted, that cleans it up and it is again a bootable HD image. I have run MacOS 7-8 era Disk First Aid and Norton Disk Doctor and Mactools Pro utils and they report the imageDisk to be in good working order when I do.)

Hope that's clear and makes sense. The X11 version doesn't crash (or very rarely crashes). The Aqua / GUI version nearly always crashes (can't make it all the way to desktop with drive icons and trash can) but on a few occasions has worked for me. JUST a few. As far as I can tell I didn't make any modifications to settings either within the System 7.5.x environment or to the Basilisk setup. The setup params, by the way, are absolutely identical for X11 and Aqua versions of Basilisk —— they're referencing the same settings and changes made by the standalone BasiliskGUI.app settings interface are reflected by the initial settings screen you get when you execute /sw/bin/BasiliskII from the X11 terminal window, and vice versa. Boots in X11, crashes in Mac-native Aqua. I'd be equally fine with getting the Aqua version fixed or getting networking implemented on the X11 version.

The crashing of the Aqua version is always at the end of attempted bootup; if it makes it to the point of showing the disk icons and trash can, it's usable and stable for the duration of that launch.

I am still not sure which build you mean with the "Aqua / MacOS-native port of Basilisk". Very different builds have been labelled version 0.1 and port 19 since 2006, a side-effect of the fact that no regular development of BasiliskII has been going on since then. I thought it might be Nigel Pearson's port that is known to be unstable on Intel, but I suppose you mean vasi's build that he compiled October last year for 10.6 and 10.7.

That build is stable for most users. In fact, I have not seen any report of the frequent crashing you describe and I myself have not had this build, or my October 2009 build, crash for a long time, not in 10.6 and not in 10.7. Not with System 7.0.1, 7.5.3, 7.5.5, or 8.1. So I suppose that it must be something in your setup or configuration. The fact that the X11 version is stable with the same settings and configuration does not necessarily mean that those are right for the OSX version. There are considerable differences between versions for different platforms.

You describe what seems to be a system crash at the end of MacOS startup. It could be the settings as saved to the prefs file, it could be the rom file, it could be some extension that is installed in MacOS, or an unfortunate combination that makes BasiliskII crash.

Maybe you can post here the content of your ~/.basilisk_ii_prefs file and tell us which rom file you use, which MacOS version you have running in BasiliskII, if it was installed as a fresh system installation in BasiliskII, and if you have installed additional software in BasiliskII that installs files in the System Folder.

OK, I feel rather foolish. You'd think I'd spend enough time running System 7 natively back in the day to remember the usefulness and necessity of futzing with extensions and control panels. The virtual hard disk is a mildly mongrelized copy of the OS environment I actually used for many years, (a fresh System and Finder to which extensions control panels and preferences were spooned in from backups of the old hard drive I'd used in the days). Been using this setup for > 9 years on the X11 version of Basilisk, and it just didn't occur to me (??) to go extension-debugging.

Yeah, I found some unimportant ones that, when disabled, allows the Aqua version to boot.