Re: My GNUstep experience.

[Nicolas Roard]

On 5/16/06, Thomas T. Cremers <thomas@thomascremers.nl> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I'm just a new guy on this list and pretty much new to GNUstep to. I've
> been busy reading documents and playing around trying to get my self
> formileur with the project and concepts. And I believe it has a lot of
> potential and it's a shame that there is so little coverage.
> I have been working as a programmer for some years now and to me this
> seems to be a project where I like to contribute in one form or another.

Welcome to GNUstep then ;-)

> To make a long story a little shorter, I spend a few days tweaking but I
> just could not get around the feeling that I was missing some essential
> piece of information. I started searching and reading again, compiled
> Etiole and played around with that.

You probably should have a look on the documentation Dennis wrote:
http://gnustep.made-it.com/
-- specifically the configuration and gworkspace guide.

> I'm not asking for an answer to all my problems, but I would be extremely
> interested in what people are using. What you like using and consider to
> be a nice environment to work in.
> I would even be so nuts to put some effort in to documenting it.

Well, GNUstep by itself doesn't really provide a desktop environment,
but it provides nearly all you'd need for applications to build one.
So basically the idea is to install GNUstep applications to form a
working environment.

I would say usual combinations involves GWorkspace + WindowMaker +
Lots of GNUstep apps: probably Preferences.app, TextEdit and Terminal
from backbone (http://www.nongnu.org/backbone/),
Addresses(http://www.giesler.biz/bjoern/en/sw_addr.html), GNUMail
(http://www.collaboration-world.com/gnumail/), apps from the
gsimageapps project (http://home.gna.org/gsimageapps/) (Preview and
Vindaloo), etc.

Still, all that is quite fragmented (even if the result looks more or
less integrated, thanks to GNUstep), and effectively Étoilé is working
to create a proper desktop environment, based on GNUstep.

But for the moment Étoilé is not usable for an end-user -- the 0.1
release concentrated mostly on providing frameworks. The future 0.2
release will probably be more interesting for users as it will feature
more applications. In the meantime you can always check what's on
étoilé's subversion repository -- there's nice things like the menu
server, the dictionary reader, etc. But it's probably a good idea to
wait for the release unless you want to play with the code and help us
;-)

Cheers,

--
Nicolas Roard
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly
by." -- Douglas Adams