Re: GNUstep installation - a 'Newbie' question

[Dennis Leeuw]

Stefan Urbanek wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Today I have showed gnustep to my friend, who liked it. He have installed it 
> with my assistence, and now knows how to use it. Installation process and 
> gnustep initialisation was really complicated thing to do. From this 
> experience i have a question... Imagine a situation...
>
> I have just learned ObjectiveC and some Cocoa stuff from some book and from 
> magasine tutorials. I have learned from my friend, how to use Gorm and 
> ProjectCenter. I like it very much, because it is easy way of creating 
> applications and ObjectiveC is not very difficult language.
> My knowledge:
>   - do not know how much from unix shells
>   - nothing about any configuration/shell profile/script files
> and i do not have to know about that stuff
>
> The only thing I have is a file manager, forget about terminal. Iam not an 
> experienced programmer and I am a person from non-technical area.
>
> Can I install gnustep? If yes, how? If no, what I need to learn?

Yes you can. Learn the bash shell basics, get familiar with vi and read
the GNUstep Build Guide (http://documents.made-it.com) :-)
Bash and vi are just examples (don't need a flame war). Where bash is a
commonly used shell on atleast GNU/Linux systems and vi is an editor
found on almost every Un*x like system.

As soon as TextEdit supports plain text files... (hint, hint) one can
skip the part about vi.
And as soon as Preferences.app supports setting the Language and the
Timezone, one can also skip the shell.
But one will always need to know something about the system, since some
parts of GNUstep need to be started at boot time. That's just the way it
is.

> Thing is, that i would like to find some easy solution for this installation 
> problem. What are the possibilities for gnustep to be installable for this 
> person?

But for now the best thing to do is to get GNUstep from your system
supplier. That means for GNU/Linux systems from the distribution maker
(e.g. SuSE, Red Hat, Slackware, etc)
If they don't have packages, ask them, the more people asking for
packages the more likely they will get there. And for all others, find
someone who can help you out.
Installing software from source on a Un*x type system means using the
shell, working with scripts and getting to know the system you are
working on.

Greetings,

Dennis Leeuw