Re: Newbie wants to use gnustep-base on NSLU2

[Fred Kiefer]

Jay Prince wrote:
> I'm interested in porting the foundation classes to the NSLU2.  The
> NSLU2 is a Linksys device sold as a network attached storage for the
> home.  It runs Linux natively, and there is a active group of people
> working on a distribution for it, and modifying the default
> distribution.  You can get more info at www.nslu2-linux.org.
>
> The devide runs an XScale (ARM) processor and currently the version of
> Linux is 2.4.something.   I know gnustep is not currently being
> maintained on ARM processors... so I'd like some advice as to the
> likely difficulty in porting the foundation stuff over.  (I don't need
> any gui classes.)

From the bugs reported, I would say that there have been only a few 
problems with base on ARM (and there is also a patch for ffcall 
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=9468). I will look 
into any problem you will find.

> Also, GCC has been ported, but I'm not sure about objective-C and
> libobjc.   I'm a bit confused-- are these part of GCC such that I can
> assume they've been ported?  Or is this something else I'm probably
> going to need to port.
>
> I've not yet got native builds going so I haven't checked to see if
> gcc will compile an objective-c source file yet on the device.  Maybe
> a better approach would be to set up a cross development environment
> on my Mac?

There is the cross compilation environment by Nikolaus Schaller for the 
Zaurus, another ARM processor: 
http://www.dsitri.de/wiki.php?page=Zaurus-X-gcc

You could try and have a look if this works for you. Nikolaus also has a 
port of GNUstep (plus additional applications) going for the Zaurus 
which is called QuantumSTEP. Sad enough this is based on a very old 
version of GNUstep. It is missing most of the fixes and extensions of 
the last six years, but has some extensions of its own.

If you find or build your own native Objective-C compiler send me a 
mail, I would be interested in that as well, but I failed to build a 
native gcc 2.95 when I tried.

> I'm an experienced programmer on Mac OS X and Java environments, but
> relatively new to Linux.
>
> I'd appreciate any advice about problems I might run into, things to
> check while porting, and just what I'd need to do (in a general way)
> to port libobjc and base over.

Good luck
Fred