GNUstep on a G4 [SOLVED]

[Uli Kusterer]

Folks,

 thanks for bearing with me, and for all your kind information. What 
follows is a short summary of how I got GNUstep running under MacOS X 
10.3.5 ("Panther"), along with a few tips where I'd improve the docs and 
what nice features I've added to my installation.

REALLY REALLY GETTING GNUSTEP

1) Download gcc-3.3.5.tar.bz2 from gcc.gnu.org's web site and bunzip2 it 
(Apple's GCC won't work, which is why we need our own). Note that, when 
I tried, neither GCC 3.3.2 nor 3.4.1 nor 3.4.2 worked. If you get weird 
errors about Objective C not working, or about a file 'c++filt3' being 
missing, you may want to try another GCC version. 3.3.2 was that "other 
version" for me.

2) Create a "build" folder next to the gcc-3.3.5 folder and cd into it, 
as described in the file README.Darwin in gnustep-make's "Documentation" 
folder.

3) run gcc 3.4.2's configure, make bootstrap and sudo make install, with 
the current folder still set to "build". The "make bootstrap" command 
can take several hours (six-ish). To save some time, you can specify 
--enable-languages=c,objc as an option when configuring, which will only 
build C and ObjC compilers, and leave out unneeded stuff like Java, C++ 
or Ada.

5) Instead of getting the needed Unix stuff (mostly libraries) from 
GNUstep.org, use Fink. Apart from libxml2, libtiff, libjpeg, libpng, 
windowmaker, libart2 and freetype2, you'll also want to get libxslt (to 
shut up configure).

6) Apart from these differences, the build guide in README.Darwin is 
pretty much current. Except that you'll want to substitute "sudo make 
install" everywhere it says "make install". So, do what it says.

7) Once you have installed all the stuff, and initialized WindowMaker, 
start X11.app (which Apple put in /Applications/Utilities. It will ask 
whether you're sure you want to use the WindowMaker Window Manager. 
Click yes.

8) Set X11.app to fullscreen mode instead of rootless (X11 -> 
Preferences...). Otherwise WindowMaker will put stuff behind the Mac 
menu bar.

9) Add the following to the .xinitrc file that Window Maker created in 
your home directory:

test -r /sw/bin/init.sh && . /sw/bin/init.sh
export CC=/usr/local/bin/gcc
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:/sw/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
. /usr/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

This file contains commands to be executed when X11 starts. The first 
line is what Fink added to your .profile when it was installed, so I 
guess it'd be a good idea to have it in XTerm as well. The second line 
makes sure that make will use GCC 3.3.5 instead of Apple's GCC. Of 
course, you'll only want this if you're only using X11 for GNUstep. The 
third line makes sure the linker finds the Fink-installed libraries, and 
the last line pulls in everything GNUstep offers in terms of command 
line tools etc.

10) Get some apps. Gorm is pretty easy to get, as is GWorkspace. The 
link for ProjectCenter on GNUstep.org is broken, but if you go into the 
FTP servers containing it, you'll find it in that folder, just with a 
different version number on the name.

I still can't believe I've got a GNUstep on my Mac now :-)

Thanks a lot to (in no particular order):
- Carl Eugen Hoyer (he tried to help me back when I tried this first)
- Quentin Mathé
- Nicola Pero
- Alex Perez
- Adam Fedor
- Andrew Pinski
- Fabien Vallon
- Markus Hitter

Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
http://www.zathras.de