Re: GNUstep distro

[Dan Hitt]

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 May 2013 21:53, Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 8:32 AM, Liam Proven <lproven@gmail.com> wrote:
>> .....

>> Although i doubt i can give you any useful help whatsoever, if you do
>> produce a Window Maker/GNUstep/Ubuntu remix, and you provide
>> instructions for installing it on a partition of a GPT hard drive, i
>> will certainly
>> do that, and let you know of any bugs i find.
>
> Hmm. That is an interesting problem. I do not own any drives larger
> than 1GB, nor an Intel Macintosh, so I have no experience with GPT. If
> I were to go ahead with an Ubuntu remix, then it would become a
> question of whether Ubuntu supported this, which I don't know. I
> presume that it is possible but I am not sure.

I'm guessing that must be a typo above for 1T.

Anyhow, if you get a 3T drive and install ubuntu (say 12.04) on it,
and let it format the disk, it will put GPT on it (since 3T is too large
for the old msdos style formatting).

And gparted will let you resize and add partitions.

It is amazingly easy to use (so, for example, i have at least
a dozen partitions on my 3T drive, with different OSes).

> .....
> Hmm. I am not sure I would regard Emacs as a standard app - it is not
> a standard part of Ubuntu, although it is in the repos. I have been
> experimenting recently with ErgoEmacs, which I like more than any
> other Linux version I have seen. I could include that, I suppose, but
> it does not integrate with GNUstep or Window Maker, not AFAIK.
>

This is getting more in the weeds i guess, and is a small point ---- if
you have a good solution for putting GNUstep on a bsd or a linux
(especially an ubuntu derivative) it would be an awesome service to
the community.  I could certainly do 'sudo apt-get install emacs'
or the equivalent.

But on this small point, it's not that i think of emacs as a standard app.

In fact, i don't think of it as an application at all --- and least not an
application in the same sense that the old great NeXTstep graphical
programs were applications.  And in fact, although i keep emacs
running all the time (from the time the machine boots up until it reboots),
i do not use any graphical version of emacs, because as a gui sort
of program, it's not very good at all, imvho.  gimp and krita and firefox
and all the programs like this, though not as good as GNUstep could be,
are far better than emacs, as applications.

However, for me, emacs is an absolutely indispensable tool for editing files,
running shells, managing code, doing compilation, and just staying
organized.

And emacs comes on every macintosh --- the command line version, not
any gui version [although gui versions are available].

So i think the people at apple know something: even though apparently
they wouldn't dream of bundling emacs as an app, they make certain
to bundle it as a tool.  Xcode you have to put on yourself, but not emacs
(at least as of 2011).

Not meaning to rant here, or tell anybody how they ought to write or
compile their code, but i think of emacs support as a sort of test
for how ready a system is.  (And this is validated by Cupertino :).)

And thanks again for thoroughly investigating the GNUstep situation.

I've certainly never dealt with a more productivity-enhancing system
than NeXTstep, and if GNUstep could be easily deployed in a non-broken
way that would just be wonderful.

dan