Getting Started w/ GNUSTEP-GUI

[Stephen Sebeny]

Hi All,

    About a year ago I asked the systems support folks in the Computer
Science department at my university to install the GNUSTEP base onto their
Solaris systems because I had been using Cocoa and wanted to use something
similar for a class project. It took some convincing, but luckily I got them
to set it up. Now I'm in a big project oriented class and am working on an
image search engine (that looks at image characteristics not just
filenames.) So I asked them to set-up the GNUSTEP GUI library as well, and
again luckily I got them to install it. However, I am having a little
trouble in taking the first steps in transiting from Cocoa to GNUSTEP GUI
and was hoping someone on this list might be able to help me with these two
issues.

    First, I started out with Nicola Pero's "First Steps in GNUstep GUI
Programming," but haven't actually been able to get it to work. I can follow
everything in the tutorial perfectly clearly as its quite basic, but I run
into a problem when trying to launch the built app.

[sebeny@lambda:~/image_test]> openapp ImageTestApp.app
/usr/local/GNUstep/System/Tools/openapp: /etc/GNUstep/GNUstep.conf: not
found

    If anyone has any idea what is causing this error in the set-up of the
GNUSTEP stuff, or has any advice on resolving the issue, I'd really
appreciate it if you could e-mail me. I'm pretty sure its an issue with the
GNUSTEP installation that I won't be able to resolve myself, but I basically
need to tell the support folks exactly what they're going to need to do as
they won't spend any time researching the issue. So any advice is very much
appreciated.

    The second issue is a bit more general. After following the tutorial
mentioned above I can see that it was meant to build a bundle based app like
a typical GUI app on Mac OS X. However, what I really need to do for my
project is to use the GNUSTEP GUI library from a command-line tool type
program. I hope this is possible. I can currently build & run tools just
fine, but if I add the include statement for the AppKit it doesn't work. I
get linker errors basically saying that the symbols for any of the classes
from the AppKit that I try to use aren't found. So from this I guess it
means the makefile for tools doesn't link the AppKit. Yet the makefile for
GUI apps makes bundle based apps. Can I get something inbetween - a tool
that links against the AppKit?

    Any and all help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

-----
Stephen M. Sebeny
sebeny.1@osu.edu