running GWorkspace with no notification server on the x windows display server

[Dan Hitt]

I've built gnustep on a linux machine A, following the gnustep build
guide (as it existed on 4/4/2003) (and with the help of Nicola:
thanks again for your help).

The x windows display i'm using is on a netbsd machine B which has no
knowledge of gnustep (and the window manager is running on another
netbsd machine C which also has no knowledge of gnustep, but which
is running window maker version 0.62.1).

I've got gdomap and gdnc running on machine A (and per the build guide
i'm running gdomap with the -p option so that it shouldn't probe
other machines).

I'm trying to run GWorkspace (0.5.1) but i get lots of alert
panels giving messages such as
   Critical Error in GWorkspace
      NSInternalInconsistencyException: unable to contact GDNC server -
        please check that the gdnc process is running
   Critical Error in GWorkspace
      NSRecursiveLockException: unlock: failed to unlock mutex
   Critical Error in GWorkspace
      NSPortTimeoutException: invalidated while awaiting reply

(I have some other errors also, no doubt due to incomplete paths
for locating other applications.)

So: is there documentation somewhere for gdnc (and gdomap)?  After
building, the directories
..../System/Documentation/{Developer,info,man,User}
are all unpopulated.

Any advice on what to do about gdnc?  (I'd greatly prefer not to have to
build gdnc on machines B or C, because everything about them is different
from A, and even if i'm able to, i imagine that gnustep is still in
a state of rapid evolution.  If it would really help, i guess i could
run the window manager from A, and maybe use a later version of
window maker.)

Finally, i really appreciate the effort Enrico, Fabien, and Alexey
have put into GWorkspace.  It looks like it has the capabilities
that a file manager should have (at least for those of us who
grew up on NeXTstep).  It also has some nice touches (such as
the Edit options being grayed out (presumably because i don't yet
have the pasteboard server running)---the only major capability
i think it might not yet have is being able to run multiple browsers
(?? but maybe it can do this, or there's some good reason why it's
not desirable ??).

Thanks in advance for any advice or pointers to faqs, manuals, info pages,
urls or whatever.

dan