Re: Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Graham J Lee]

On 27 Aug 2004, at 17:34, Adrian Robert wrote:

> > Figuring out how to start a GNUstep session became a real challenge.  
> > I
> > beat the bushes for a while and found this HOWTO:
>
> I use GNUstep on Debian but just do a plain Xsession running 
> WindowMaker as the manager (put wmaker as the last command in 
> ~/.xsession).  With some cajoling, you can eventually get gnustep apps 
> into icons in WindowMaker's dock, and you can have some of these 
> (e.g., recycler, gworkspace) start automatically on startup.

Something I do [a]for consistency with NeXTSTEP [b]as it makes logging 
out require less clicks, is to have a .xinitrc that looks like:

[...]
exec openapp GWorkspace.app

That way, when you quit the workspace you log out of your X session.

>  While there might be login.app (I haven't tried it), as far as I know 
> GNUstep doesn't do much session mgmt for now, and you are best off 
> using WindowMaker.  (You also have to use "click-to-focus" mode or 
> else menus will not work.)

Login.app provides a NeXT/Apple like loginwindow, and lets you do funky 
things like dropping to the console by entering "console", or halting 
by entering "halt" and the root password.  It doesn't do any real 
session management and just runs out of inittab as a login manager.  It 
doesn't do any of the more advanced things that [xkg]dm do.

> I don't bother with the rc.local stuff, the things like gdomap, etc. 
> get started up automatically when needed anyway.

That works but is slower...although I'm a little confused; if a normal 
user tries to automagically start gdomap, how does it bind to port 538?

Cheers,

Graham.
--
Graham Lee
UNIX Systems Manager
http://nextstep.sdf-eu.org