Re: Newbie wants to use gnustep-base on NSLU2

[Dr. Nikolaus Schaller]

Jay Prince <jayprince@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:<mailman.1837.1108178665.2841.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>...
> Linux is 2.4.something.   I know gnustep is not currently being
> maintained on ARM processors... so I'd like some advice as to the
> likely difficulty in porting the foundation stuff over.  (I don't need
> any gui classes.)

As Fred already commented, there is a port of a snapshot of GNUstep to
the ARM
processor (called mySTEP and also open Source of course:
http://www.dsitri.de/wiki.php?page=mySTEP ).

Please note that being based on an older snapshot does not mean that
mySTEP is full of bugs that have already been solved in the
mainstream. We have fixed many of them (sometimes in parallel to
GNUstep). And we have (re)integrated some newer classes of GNUstep.
But since our goal is to follow Cocoa as good as possible, we have
left out some GNUstep extensions that are not available on the Mac.
And I think it requires less libraries being installed to work.

> Also, GCC has been ported, but I'm not sure about objective-C and
> libobjc.   I'm a bit confused-- are these part of GCC such that I can
> assume they've been ported?  Or is this something else I'm probably
> going to need to port.

The main difficulty was to add libobjc to the system and make the
NSInvocation
stuff working - in case you want to use distributed objects. mySTEP
includes an libobc.so (linux shared library) making executables very
small (sometimes just 4-8k). mySTEP libraries require approx. 5 MByte
on the ARM.

The integration into Xcode works by adding a shell script build phase
that cross-compiles the application and inserts it into the already
compiled MacOS X application (or loadable or framework) bundle (that
is good if you want to test and debug the application initially on the
Mac).

> I've not yet got native builds going so I haven't checked to see if
> gcc will compile an objective-c source file yet on the device.  Maybe
> a better approach would be to set up a cross development environment
> on my Mac?

Yes, please try Zaurus-X-gcc. It is a complete preconfigured gcc
2.95.3 package including Objective-C.

If you need assistance, please PM and/or use the forum
http://www.dsitri.de/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13

-- hns