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The NeXT-Best Thing: GNUSTEP 0.9.4 Live CD
roard writes "Following the NeXT tradition with mixed case, GNUSTEP is a live CD/distribution while GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API. GNUSTEP is based on Morphix, and uses the GNUstep libraries and GNUstep-based applications to provide a NeXTSTEP-like environment that people can easily test and use. This new 0.9.4 release comes 8 months since the precedent 0.5 release, and brings a lot of new GNUstep applications with it, as well as an upgrade of the GNUstep libraries and the development tools. In other news, a small demonstration of GNUstep development tools is available in Flash or divx. The old dream of having a GNU OS with Hurd and an OpenStep implementation doesn't seems that far now ;)"
It WAS championed as the default for GNU, like 10 years ago. Except it took forever go get usable, has like three serious developers and very few applications, and therefore is almost entirely useless to the end user. As for OS X compatibility, name one OS X program that has been ported to GNUStep. Thought not.
If you want an evironment where The Voice Of God comes down and tells everyone stop their C/C++ crap and go write Objective C programs, use OS X. It's never going to happen with Linux.
I'm waiting for the MP/M LiveCD!
really, it looks terrible.
it is a good framework, and brilliantly implemented in OS X... but this GNU look is really awful! they need artists... LOTS of artists.
i could barely even follow the demo as the IDE and general look of the thing was so confusing and horrible that i wasn't able to even see where the obvious buttons were to press.
they may be doing wonders with implementing the whole framework... but it needs polish.
Actually SCO is after IBM for breach of contract, all the stuff about copyright breach and putting stuff into Linux has been dropped. That is, SCO claim IBM put stuff in Linux that they shouldn't have, but the stuff they alledgedly put in was still owned by IBM, the question is whether IBM was breaching its contract with SCO by putting that code in, not whether that code can legally be in Linux.
I do, however, have two minor criticisms.
Firstly, please, please update the look-and-feel. If you want to be taken seriously, don't look like a reject from the 80s. Given GNUsteps modularity, this should be easy enough to do. So, do it. (Tip: application icons should always have labels, because since they're supposed to be unique you can pretty much guarantee they're going to be unfamiliar to someone.)
Secondly, I didn't see any support for layout management in Gorm --- that application was constructed by just placing absolute-sized objects at absolute positions in a window. Please tell me this isn't how you design all applications... because that way leads to inflexible, unscalable, uncustomisable applications, and there's no excuse for that any more. Fixed layouts mean you can't let the user change fonts, because different fonts are different shapes (you can't just scale linearly). Fixed layouts mean wasted screen estate (remember the old Mac file browser dialogues that would float a tiny, eight-line scrollable list in the middle of a 21" monitor?). Fixed layouts are just wrong.
The appearance is only skin deep. Creating a theme that looks "good"? That's easy, get some graphic designers together with a usability safety inspector.
Writing a complete framework with rich, well thought-out object libraries? Now that is a feat. GNUStep is a lurker project that is getting close to hitting critical mass. They've got the hard stuff done that others are still swinging at but not quite hitting.
No, the GNUStep people have been much more concerned with laying sewer lines, roadways, electrical grids, water, gas, etc. When they get around to picking the color for their street signs, it'll be good.
Some work is already going into theming.
Now that GNUStep is getting really close to being complete, I hope they look at Cairo as a base for doing something similar to Quartz.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I have to disagree with you on the UI. It looks really ugly. Like, motif-level ugly. I'm sure it's all just themes, but open one of those apps and open a default kde app along side it and tell me the user is going to choose that one. If they want this to be a serious choice for end users, they're going to have to stick some sheen on it.
I am trolling
You sure 'bout that?
And as far as viruses, if you think that something that requires active user input and a password to run, then all UNIX-type systems are vulnerable thusly:
sudo rm -rf
Save that with executable permission and send it to your Linux-using buddies, see what happens when they run it. But it ain't a virus.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Another fork in the road? Why is it that UNIX/Linux development forks so GODDAMN many times? Why is it that no one is satisfied with working on the original and staying within that distro's limits? Nope... instead we've got some zipperhead who thinks, "Hey, Steve Jobs never did it right, the last crew couldn't do it, I KNOW I can do it!" And instead of something successful, we've got 2 marginally different distros, neither of which is going to win more market share than the other. So what have you accomplished?
Keep it up, we'll have nothing left but crumbs! We'll have hundreds of distributions, and 1 or 2 users running each flavor. Open source will be terribly important cuz you'll NEVER get a working piece of software without spending a decade writing it yourself, or recompile, troubleshoot, recompile, troubleshoot, repeat, repeat, etc on someone's port for GNUStep, GNUSTEP, OpenStep, or NeXT.
This is getting out of hand.
http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
This is developed (apparently) by folks from Intel. It's just that nobody can't be bothered to include it into the kernel.
ACPI spec is publicly available, but nobody can be bothered to fully implement it.
Finally, nice examples of UI are available even within OSS community, yet every distro out there ships with UI that was, it seems, put together by a teenager.
I've always like NeXT and Windowmaker much better than Gnome and definitely better than KDE (sorry K-guys, it's waaaaay too much like Windows).
In fact, even Gnome is too much like Windows; even tho it does incorporate some OS X like features as well. But it also seems too fragile and it seems to be going more along the lines of C# dev, which I'm definitely not partial to (it's a mistake guys!).
Obviously, I feel that NeXT/OpenStep got a lot of things goin in the right direction. Turning away from the copy-all-Windows-features mindset seems to be the more logical choice. Will Gnome and KDE still exist? Absolutely. But Windowmaker - regardless of its sometimes slow development pace - is much more of a joy to use than whatever the current default Gnome window mananger is.
I spent many years developing in a Windowmaker environment and they were quite productive. That time changed the way I looked at using my desktop and even though I've switched to OS X, I can still tweak it to work like Windowmaker. So I'll have to second it as the official desktop env for Linux, hands down.
Linux intellectual property is not currently being litigated.
The SCO case is currently against IBM, and only IBM, for contract violation.
While SCO has attempted to spread FUD about Linux, no case disputing Linux intellectual property is currently in litigation.
The only way you could possibly think otherwise is if you read Slashdot headlines but never RTFA.
You are a fanboy.
Quarts came out in 10.2 so I'm pretty sure its not what you suggest.
I'm being pedantic, but : Quartz is the basically the whole windowing system, and has existed since NeXTStep (with a different name), Quartz Exteme is just a marketing name for a particular type of hardware accelleration of Quartz functions. (And *NO*, Windows does not have an equivalent feature -- GDI is not the same thing -- Longhorn's Unified Compositing Engine *IS*)
(if i can educate ONE person with this...)
Why do most open source programmers always seem to have the tendency to go with oppressive dark UI colours? It's not cool and it's not pretty. It's along the lines of someone creating their first webpage, complete with black background and white text.
Well, I'd rather go with the GNUstep vision of duplicating and improving on OS X, than the KDE/GNOME vision of duplicating Windows...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"If you want an evironment where The Voice Of God comes down and tells everyone stop their C/C++ crap and go write Objective C programs, use OS X. It's never going to happen with Linux."
This comes off a lot like, "who cares if it's better, we're all used to something worse and we plan on sticking with it." Which is very much the same argument made by Windows advocates against Linux.
And this does not sum up the attitude of a lot of Linux users? What if it was stated like this:
"Who cares if it's better, we're all used to the same tools we had 30 years ago and we plan on sticking with them."
[[Non-troll disclaimer:]]
Yes, this is a broad generalization. No, it doesn't describe every Linux/Unix user. Yes, there is still a lot of truth in it.
The OP has it right. It's impossible to enforce a development environment or methodology (or pretty much any standard) unless either you control the platform (like Apple does), or there's already a de facto standard in place (C programming, for instance).
Java: the bastard demon spawn of C++ and Ada
There really are no forks - no boundaries. Everything is one big soup - the illusion of form appears when a project from one dimension intersects with any other.
GNUStep is GNUstep is GNUstep, whether on Windows, OS X, Linux, or the friggin HURD.. You don't have problems compiling against someone's build of GTK/GTK2.
While you may be right, I feel obligated to point out that your "vendor shipments" data is pretty much completely useless when one is discussing a Free OS like Linux or the BSDs, because, put simply, there is no simple indicator for the amount of instances deployed.
With Mac OS X, simply looking at how many units Apple shipped will tell you how many people are adopting Mac OS X. It's quite an accurate indicator and it can be trusted.
With Linux, there are many commercial distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, etc) as well a number of wildly popular free ones (Debian, Slackware). You can buy servers with these pre-installed, but I would be surprised if most Linux deployments were obtained this way. As there are no restrictions on redistribution of GPL'd code (unless changes have been made, obviously, in which case those changes must be made available), how many instances of say, Red Hat Linux sold will tell you nothing whatever about how many systems actually run the OS.
Even with Windows, it's difficult to say; Windows comes pre-installed on most systems whether you want it or not. While I wouldn't expect that a startlingly large percentage of Windows machines have their OS replaced immediately after being bought, it is undeniable that a number of them do (my laptop, for example, came with Windows XP, but now runs Debian). Again, I'm not saying we're a huge percentage -- but we are a percentage.
Really, Mac OS X is pretty much the only OS on the market today whose deployment can be accurately measured with unit shipments (although I don't doubt that there are some people out there that would buy PPC hardware and run Linux or *BSD -- I would, no offense to OS X).
So basically, Apple being the world's largest vendor of UNIX means only that Apple sells more UNIX than any other company -- which means nothing with respect to Linux, and IIRC, at least currently, there are more Linux boxes than there are Mac OS X boxes, by a long shot (although I wouldn't be surprised, given Apple's rising popularity, if this were to change in the near future).
Anyway, I'm not disparaging the Macintosh, or your facts, just pointing out that your argument is pretty much non sequitur in this context. If you were comparing Apple to say, Sun, you'd be much more on the mark.
The Power of Lisp lies in that messy syntax is the problem. Without it the macro system wouldn't be possible.
The syntax is actually really easy to use, even without a text editor to balance parenthesis for you. The problem is that it isn't easy to use at first, especially if you have prior programming knowledge with one of the many Algol-like languages. It also takes a bit of knowledge of functional programming because it is often easier to do things functionally than imperatively (especially when you have a compiler that ensures tail call optimization).
Of course, there is room for many different programming languages and there are enough users of Lisp to keep it alive and that's all that really matters. The rest of the world can suffer with C and C++ :)
SML is cool, I know a guy who did some work on the SML/NJ compiler (I think it was SML/NJ, it might have been another one but it was at CMU that he did it). I prefer Lisp even though I probably should prefer SML :)
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!