Having given up on trying to install it on my Fedora GNULinux box (see below) I thought I would try it on an old Windows XP box I had (sitting in a closet and waiting to be eventually thrown in the garbage since I do everything on GNULinux these days).
On XP, I've downloaded and installed everything, in the proper order (Ming32 version) right from the GnuStep website web page. The shell works. I can do compiles and ./configures and makes (yes gnumakes) and make installs). BUT.... the ONLY piece of software I can get to work is GoMoku by N. Pero. That compiles, installs and works fine, I tried board sizes up to 20x20. Tough game to beat at medium difficulty level too! All other software packages I've tried, most of them will either not compile without error or else they will compile fine and then crash on immediately on startup with a message about do I want to "send" the bug report to Microsoft (I don't!!). Even "Calculator", which gives an hour glass for a few moments, crashes immediately. As with linux, the full path to the exe must be given. I went to my old Windows XP box in desperation after having spent HOURS attemptng to get GNUSTEP to install on my usual Fedora Core 14 box properly. There the sticking point was ... "You do not have either ffcall or libffi installed, or configure needs --with-ffi-include and/or --with-ffi-library flags so GNUstep can find them, or you have ffcall but gnustep-make is configured to use native exceptions (native exceptions are not compatible with ffcall). GNUstep requires ffcall or libffi and proper libobjc hooks to do invocations and DO. (This does not apply on apple-apple-apple systems where DO is not compatible with other GNUstep systems.)" "You most likely do not want to build base without DO support. Many things, including all applications, won't work at all without DO. If you really want to build -base without DO support, add --disable-do to the configure arguments. For more information, read the GNUstep build guide, ffcall section: http://gnustep.made-it.com/BuildGuide/index.html configure: error: Incomplete support for ffi functionality." The "For more information" ffcall section does some explaining but does not give sufficient info to fix the problem. In particular, it should have given some example commands using the ffi ./configure flags in addition to giving some indication as to when they are used, if both flags are needed and when, and under what circumstances ffcall might have been used instead, and how. Since it is obvious the developers have spent YEARS on this thing and it has impressive features and potential, it is obviously my own lack of expertise that is blocking me from trying it out. But... I only have so much time for it. As a last ditch effort, I downloaded and burned the GNUSTEP live iso on a cd and tried to boot with that. My older Magnavox LCD flat screen monitor flummoxed that attempt. The install goes smoothly, it detects various hardware thingies, the wireless card etc. but then stops at a shell prompt after failing to start XWindows. Trying "startx" at this point crashes with a blank screen. But, since I have a usable shell at that point (complete with nice blue screen bacground) perhaps I can fiddle with xorg.conf and get up some kind of generic monitor/xwindow settings. Last but not least the GNUSTEP live CD will not boot at all on my 2006 Sony Vaio Laptop, perhaps the encrypted disk is giving it a problem, I don't know. The only thing I have to try is to go back to the XP box (Yuck!) , and look at the code for Pero's GoMoku which is the only thing that works (?!!) and see what his code is in comparison with the code in the examples that I got from the GNUSTEP website. I did compile that from a different place than where I put the GNUSTEP website example code and games. Or get a newer flat screen. J _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
