Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Gisli Ottarsson]

GNUstep developers:

Yesterday I got the urge to take GNUstep for a spin.  As a user of
Debian unstable this seemed simple.  Using apt-get, I installed the
gnustep package and the associate "suggested" and "recommended"
packages.  This went well.  I then logged out and expected to find
GNUstep as a new session option in the gdm login screen.  No such luck.

Figuring out how to start a GNUstep session became a real challenge.  I
beat the bushes for a while and found this HOWTO:

 http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/GNUstep-HOWTO

which explains how GNUstep should be started by modifying files in
rc.local.  This seems awfully messy and I threw in the towel without
ever seeing GNUstep in its glory.

I think you are missing an opportunity here. Many of the Linux boxes
out there are going to be running gdm or kdm and explaining how to have
gdm and kdm offer GNUstep as an option would greatly simplify the life
of curious users (and would-be converts) as myself.  This has been
suggested before:

 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2003-10/msg00170.html

The distributions I have come across, that offer gdm as a display
manager, have a Sessions directory, (e.g., /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions) which
contains a single file for each of the available session types (e.g., 
Gnome, IceWM,  KDE, Xfce, fluxbox).  I imagine kdm operates similarly.

Perhaps the maintainer of the Debian packages for GNUstep is the right
person to correct this.  After all, the aforementioned gdm/Sessions
files for Xfce and fluxbox were added by the respective packages.

Thanks for your attention.

  Gisli