GNUstep LiveCD is an implementation of NeXT Computer’s OpenStep programming environment on a Morphix bootable CD base. The CD is currently at version 0.5, and its pre-release status shows. GNUstep LiveCD is buggy and ineffective as a development environment, and isn’t yet ready for use in the real world, says NewsForge.
Doing the GNUstep two-step
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
the review is quite fair, but he mostly has problems with the LiveCD itself (based on morphix, so the problems are not really tied only this livecd I guess), not the development environment itself..
Imagine a complete desktop environment based on GNUstep, as polished as the GNOME desktop, with a native webbrowser, window manager, and consistent user interface design like in gnome, coders would be flooding towards Obj-C and GNUstep.
Until this happens, the GNUstep project will probably remain in the shadows forever.
I remember reading on the mailing lists archives that someone was porting WebCore over to GNUstep, I remember thinking that this would be the key, soon there would be a native GNUstep webbrowser, and more and more desktop apps would follow, together with more users and more coders.
He didn’t get a very enthusiastic response on the mailing list though, too bad.
It’s a bit clueless to test the quality of the GNUstep LiveCD with apps like blender and wings3d, which arent gnustep apps. The whole point with the GNUstep LiveCD must be to try the gnustep environment and ‘native’ applications. Right?
A couple of days ago I bought an old gecko Workstation with NextStep 3.3 on ebay. The machine has a 60 MHz HP-PA RISC processor and 64 MB or RAM. So far I did not do much with this machine, but I am already very impressed. I can run the machine with 1280 x 1024, the apps are very nice and I really like the NextStep GUI.
I would definitely like to see GNUStep proceed. I think, webcore will really push GNUStep forward. As far as I know, some parts of webcore are already ported to GNUStep, but the guy that did it decided to wait for gcc 4.0 which will support objC++, which is necessary for webcore.
There is alo http://www.opendarwin.org/, which looks very interesting. I think OpenDarwin with GNUStep could be a really great platform.
What I have always hope is that GNUstep would get more developers for Obj-C and take on KDE and Gnome. If they had the mass of developers programs written fro GNUStep could be ported to OS X. Software development for OS X and linux could grow by leaps and bounds, plus linux could get a better foothold with more consistancy for desktop use to the masses. As a previous Linux cheerleader, I often felt that to get to the masses Linux needed a consistant look and feel, which GNUstep would bring? What do you guys thinK? Sorry for my anti-microsoft rant, but anything to take on the Redmond Giant would be a great thing for consumers.
Nice to see that all the news sites are still copying each others articles. It would be nice once to goto slashdot, newsforge and osnews. And not find the same article copied over and over again. It’s time to come up with some fresh news articles instead of just copying each other’s..
I agree with the above poster that he seems to have trouble more with the LiveCD than the environment, and towards the bottom, the author mentions this. I thought the comment about WindowMaker being a poor choice was a little tangential.
How long has GNUStep been around? Is there a reason it hasn’t caught on as well?
“, but the guy that did it decided to wait for gcc 4.0 which will support objC++, which is necessary for webcore.”
Huh, what is objC++? As far as I know gcc has supported objC for a loooooooong time. In fact NeXTstep and OSX native compiler was/is gcc.
This is one of the most useless review I’ve ever read. Not to mention that Eugenia doesn’t try to extract any positive things from it, but rather just one sentence that doesn’t reflect at all the whole article. The author didn’t review the development tools, yet criticize them. The LiveCD is a demo, not something you would use in so-called “real world” for your day-to-day work. Better not link useless things like that and save us some time.
ObjC++ allows you to use Objective-C and C++ in the same file. It’s integral to Apple’s wrapper layer around KHTML.
(from my post @ the newforge article…)
There is an always on-going discussion on the GNUstep mailing lists concerning “What is GNUstep?” — however, this article solely discusses the GNUstep LiveCD.
The GNUstep LiveCD can be thought of as a GNU/Linux distribution that offers a desktop environment based on applications based on the GNUstep development environment, as well as other applications not based on GNUstep development enviroment to make a more complete, usable distribution.
I make this clarification for a number of reasons:
– The GNUstep LiveCD is “not GNUstep”
– The article reviews the LiveCD specifically, and does not explore the depths of what GNUstep can do. (I do, indeed, think the author makes this somewhat clear.)
While this is really picky in definition, there has been a lot of sore discussions about what GNUstep is, so I’d rather not have people start to think that the GNUstep LiveCD is GNUstep.
The GNUstep community is active, and generally a really friendly place [heh, just read the faq’s and manuals before asking silly questions. ;-)]. GNUstep is supported on a good handful of distro’s including the LiveCD discussed in the article, as well as Gentoo, Arch, and Debian. (I do not know the state of Arch or Debian GNUstep support specificially, but I am the maintainer of GNUstep on Gentoo, and while “in testing”, packages are usuable and stable on x86 and ppc, atm.)
As for the choice of WindowMaker as the default window manager, there id one main reason it was chosen: WindowMaker works well with GNUstep to recreate the NeXTStep / OpenStep look and feel. Since GNUstep is a free software implementation of the OpenStep 4.2 open specification, it follows that the default general feel of the UI is designed to act like OpenStep. However, GNUstep is highly configurable, and the choice of what window manager to use is up to the end user.
Overally, GNUstep is fairly ready to use. The gnustep-make and gnustep-base packages are “post 1.0”, but the -gui and -back packages are still “pre 1.0”. GNUstep is still in development, but also a very exciting free software alternative to the original NeXTStep frameworks.
Armando Di Cianno
aka fafhrd
The summary of the newsforge review is incorrect and misrepresents what was said. The review itslef has some debatable spots, but even leaving that aside the conclusion is not what one would think by reading the osnews summary.
This is unfortunate because, while there are indeed issues that need to be addressed, GNustep has reached a stage were it is perfecly usable for development, and the LiveCD makes it easy for users to test that.
It seems that Eugenia didn’t read the article. The article at newsforge strictly deals with the LiveCD, not the development environment.
The author even says, “I love the GNUstep development environment” he never says it’s ineffectual at all. Please read the article before you take Eugenia’s word for it.
Gregory John Casamento
— GNUstep’s Gorm Maintainer —
When one wants to “develop on GNUstep”, one is saying “writing tools/applications/etc using the GNUstep framework, a free software version of the OpenStep 4.2 open specification”.
Because of common lineage, one can compare GNUstep, in this regard, to Cocoa on OS X (but Cocoa contains OS X specificate extensions, likely to never be supported, and general extensions which are likely to be supported on GNUstep. Then, “developing on Cocoa” could be mostly synonymous with “developing on GNUstep.”
Having said all this, development on GNUstep is fun and exciting. However, yes, because of the pre-1.0 nature of GNUstep framework as a whole, deploying to a GNUstep based desktop environment is still somewhat annoying. All one has to really learn, if they have not yet, is Objective-C.
Objective-C is easy to learn, while breaking from a procedural programming language to an object oriented language may take some re-programming of one’s own mind. Objective-C itself has only 1 (one) actual extensions to C itself. Compare this with the insanity of C++ (just my humble opinion). Now, Objective-C itself won’t get one very far. The power of ObjC is the fact that it has always been coupled with Foundation and AppKit from NeXTStep/Cocoa/GNUstep. There is no reinventing the wheel in GNUstep/Cocoa/ObjC … from the ground up the language, libraries, culture of the language promote actual reuse of code.
Just more fyi.
What I am interested in seeing is an ubercool theme on par with MacOSX, KDE, GNOME.
I guess from all these news releases that GNUStep is an excellent framework, but how about making its look more acceptable to a larger audience.
I would like to know how WindowMaker actually works. As I find it confusing.
That would bring something new to OSNEWS.com
A tutorial would be nice.
I guess Eugenia took the author’s word (complain) about text editor saving as rich text by default (hence not suitable as development environment). So her conclusion came out like that. She didn’t take into account that, that text editor almost has nothing to do with developer environment on GNUstep, which is quite nice (and the author of the article likes it too).
Here are two Window Maker tutorials, although they both seem to be unmaintained:
http://largo.windowmaker.org/
http://main.linuxfocus.org/~georges.t/index.html
Basically there are two special icons, “dock” and “clip”. When you open an application (from xterm or from a right-click desktop menu), an “appicon” also appears on the desktop and you can drag the icon either next to dock or clip where it sticks as a quick-launch icon. Clip is also a workspace switcher and you can use it to associate appicons to specific workspaces while appicons next to dock show in all workspaces.
Right-clicking dock or clip or an appicon shows small menus with extra options. There’s also a GUI config application, WPrefs, where you can configure most aspects of Window Maker without messing with config files. Window Maker is a fast and good-looking windowmanager and I hope its development continues (anti-aliased fonts would be a nice addition).
Camaelon is a project that was started to add basic themeing ability to GNUstep.. Basic Camaelon theme looks great! somewhere on http://www.roard.com you can find the source code, although a lot of work has been happening since that 0.1 release and I’m not sure if it still works with more recent gnustep versions (maybe they have it in CVS though).
And WildMenus is another Bundle that changes the vertical menu to a horizontal menu (Mac style).
Thanks for the links and explanation.
I guess what always confused me is what you said, an “appicon” also appears on the desktop and you can drag the icon either next to dock or clip
I just never new the correct place to put it.
Like I mentioned in the discussion following another article here on OSNews, work is in progress to create a better looking theme with Camaelon. One of the sample screenshots from the not yet finished theme is found here:
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/screenshot_theme29.png
Remember that “better looking” is subjective. I believe that many, if not most, of the GNUstep developers actually like the NeXT look and feel better than for instance that of MacOS X.
Yeah, adding a third desktop environment would really improve consistency…NOT. What we really need to do is get everyone signed up to freedesktop.org and expanding the standards there. Eventually, either gnome or kde is going to have to bite the bullet and switch to the other one’s widget toolkit, or else one of them needs to die.My money’s on gnome, simply because it’s easier to port from c to c++ than the other way round, but also because KDE has given ground in a lot of other areas (D-BUS, possibly switching from arts to gstreamer, gnome icons available…)
text editor saving as rich text by default (hence not suitable as development environment).
Edit.app in GNUstep presumably saves as rich text because Edit.app in OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP does also. I’m guessing since Edit.app can edit in plaintext then Edit.app in GNUstep can also.
Edit.app in GNUstep presumably saves as rich text because Edit.app in OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP does also. I’m guessing since Edit.app can edit in plaintext then Edit.app in GNUstep can also.
Yes, it can.