Re: NeXT GNU Homage Project Work

[Adam S]

Paul - " Is the plan to turn Raspbian into something akin to, say, OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach?

Personally, I feel that's easily possible (just a script that invokes 'configure' with options so that all the GNUstep directories live in root, ala Rhapsody/OSX.)"

Adam - I think this is absolutely the way to go. "RASPstep" :) This would look, work and feel like a sort of unofficial NeXTStep/OPENSTEP X.0. Look, feel and function as close to NeXTStep as possible but also running natively in Raspbian and opening up all the functions and protocols for computing in 2015.

What would we be missing (app/function wise)? I can keep on talking to the ex NeXT developer community to see if we help plug any code gaps.

Adam.

PS - I had an email from Larry Tessler yesterday (he of the Copy & Paste PARC/Apple), it was for a separate project but I'll guess he might know some handy people. I'll ask!

On Nov 15, 2015 12:29 AM, "Paul Ward" <asmodai@gmail.com> wrote:

On 14 Nov 2015, at 15:52, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

Hi

(removing most CC'd people, since they can read us on the mailing list)

Adam S wrote:

So - we have a passion for NeXTStep and GNUStep, and its really key that we keep GNU going and inject some life back into it.

Granted :) Or I wouldn't be working for GNU-related stuff. Seeing where proprietary OS's are going

Open to discussion of course, but how I feel we can do this is by working together and develop GNUStep into something great which acts as both a homage to NeXTStep OS but also gives us the opportunity to develop our "one day I want to do..." projects!

Sure. GNUstep is just a piece, the foundation where you can build on. Actually, you need an underlying OS, but there you have a broad choice and that is what I like in GNUstep.
- Almost any Linux Flavour
- FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD work nowadays all very well with GNUstep! Remember that NeXT was BSD based
- Solaris from version 8+ (although 7 perhaps still works). Due to thread stuff we dropped vintage 2.5/2.6 so if you have a trusty SparcStation either you upgrade OS or change to a BSD flavour
- limited but working Windows support (I need to try ReactOS)

I don't know how Darwin fits

I haven't paid attention to Darwin since the OpenDarwin project folded, though I understand that there's a new effort called PureDarwin.  I assume GNUstep will support it, as Darwin is just Xnu + FreeBSD.

Being honest, hacking up a Darwin+GNUstep 'distro' has been an itch I've been meaning to scratch for a long time -- with the caveat that anything created during such an effort be portable so that others can use it with their preferred platform (for example, I wrote a 'uname' tool for NeXT platforms that can also be used on OSX as it makes use of Mach calls -- this wouldn't work on other systems).

As an example I'm working on Cuboid, a mini replica NeXT Cube using Raspbian and GNU. I've already had help and support from Richard and Riccardo, and I can't wait to share the end result with everyone!

Is the plan to turn Raspbian into something akin to, say, OPENSTEP 4.2 for Mach?

Personally, I feel that's easily possible (just a script that invokes 'configure' with options so that all the GNUstep directories live in root, ala Rhapsody/OSX.)  The biggest issue here is that not all required applications exist for GNUstep -- unless Etoile has some that we could modify.

Ok - so do we want to do this through this email, LinkedIn or a Google group maybe?

I retrict LinkedIn to professional use. Like facebook for work :) also quite filled nowadays with marketing and propaganda.
While having GNUstep there might help our "business image" home projects like yours perhaps find a better place elsewhere.
I'd prefer not using Google+. Perhaps facebook is fine, put shiny pictures in our group :)

However, if you have technical issues, questions and discussion about the libraries and most applications, just use the Mailing list here. Most of the Steppers read this place, so it is the place where you are most likely to get an answer!

I've just subscribed to discuss-gnustep, so I'm happy to keep this here.

Regards,
Paul.