[NTLK] [OT][ANN] basiliskiivm: A VM management utility for the BasiliskII 68k Mac emulator

[Morgan Aldridge]

I've got some data I'm trying to get off my Newton and writing a bit of
Newton code to bridge some gaps seems like my best bet at this point, so I
found myself setting up a Newton dev environment... again. An old Mac still
seems like the best dev environment after all these years (with the most
documentation, examples, and other resources, anyway). I have literal piles
of old Macs, but neither the time nor space to set one up for such a task
right now. The quickest route was to re-install & configure BasiliskII (a
great 68k Mac emulator), incl. installing MacOS 7.x and the Newton dev
tools (innumerable thanks to everyone who contributed to the excellent
"NewtonDev" <http://www.unna.org/view.php?/development/NewtonDev> disk
image).

After doing so, then moving all the files around & symlinking the
preferences to their default location, I wished that BasiliskII data &
configs were all just packaged nicely into VMs like
VirtualBox/VMware/Parallels/etc. So, I made a utility to create, run, and
manage exactly such BasiliskII "VMs":

  <http://github.com/morgant/basiliskiivm>

While it's still pre-release and incomplete, I expect to have v0.1 out in a
week or two. It currently supports running (creating, coming soon) and
snapshots (so I can always have a fresh state to go back to, if I screw up
my install) of ".BasiliskIIVM" VMs. I've written & tested it on OS X, but
it's just Bash and written pretty platform-agnostically, so it should work
well on other UNIX-like OSes with little-to-no modification. Hopefully the
few of you out there who still use BasiliskII will find it useful and that
it makes managing BasiliskII VMs easier (it should also make sharing Newton
dev environments a piece of cake... er, sip of soup?).

This utility also means that if it turns out that this attempt at
developing some Newton software doesn't work out and my BasiliskII data
sits around for a long time, I won't have lost track of all the bits &
pieces again and can just pick up where I left off.

Let me know if you end up trying it.

Signed,

Desperately Trying to Optimize my Newton Use in Business Processes So I Can
Get Back to UNNA.org Improvements