Re: Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Gisli Ottarsson]

Thanks Adrian and Graham.  I'll take another stab at GNUstep over the
week-end.  

In my earlier post, I itemized a list of choices available to me from
gdm.  Only later did I realize that although I have wmaker installed on
my machine, it is not one of the choices offered.  Perhaps, if it had 
been there, my confusion would not have been as great.

It was pointed out to me that unlike KDE and GNOME, GNUstep is not a
desktop environment.  I question the value of such a distinction. 
There may be some nuances that make GNUstep unlike KDE/GNOME, but I
think it would be more helpful to my fellow mortals if GNUstep were
simply positioned as an alternative to KDE and GNOME and showed up as a
choice in gdm (but now I am repeating myself).

Thanks for all the input.

  Gisli







On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 16:44, Graham J Lee wrote:
> 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.