OpenStep, GNUstep Archive

A Morphix-based GNUstep live CD has been released for i386. It includes many GS apps, such as MPlayer (GS port), GWorkspace, Preview, GNUmail, ProjectCenter and many more. It can be installed to a hard drive.

Stefan has released an alpha version of his GNUstep port of WebCore, the KHTML-based renderer used by Apple's Safari web browser. The code includes a simple browser program.

The SimplyGNUstep project was started a little over two years ago. It's goal was to create a pure GNUstep based user oriented desktop operating system. It used the Linux kernel and the standard GNU software, but it was not like any other standard Linux distribution.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Inc. This release features many improvements and enhancements of various classes, including NSPopUpButton, NSBitmapImageRep, NSMenu, and NSToolbar. Support for thumbnail images was implemented in NSWorkspace. On other toolkit news, wxWindows 2.4.2 was released recently.

Every so often I have this urge (maybe more of an itch) to spend hours and hours on the web trying to find information about old, obsolete computers of the past. I am intrigued by the XEROX Alto and Star ('70s-'82), the Apple Lisa ('83) and, of course, CRAYs ('75-ish). These were revolutionary machines indeed, they wrote golden pages in the history of computing. In the end of the 1980s, a new innovative product was ready to ship, created by a bunch of people coming from Apple: The NeXT platform.

A new PDF-based magazine is available, regarding NEXTSTEP and OpenStep. You can find information ahbout X11 under NeXT, how to run OpenStep under VMWare, a Rhapsody FAQ and how to run it on VPC and more. This coming week await an introduction article to the NeXT universe, here, at OSNews.

This release of GNUstep-gui features a brand new text system with better font and layout support. In addition, printing has been fixed so that images are printed correctly. The rest of the GNUstep libs had updates recently too. On other toolkit news, this article over at DevChannel.org will introduce the C++ wrapper libraries for the GNOME foundation's GNOME C framework, Gtkmm.

The new release of the objC GNUstep API, 0.8.3, contains preliminary support for OpenGL. Other improvements include simple printing, print previewing, and more documentation. Also recently, the C++ APIs of Fox Toolkit and wxWindows had new releases too. Update: FLTK had a new version too.

GNUstep is a set of general-purpose Objective-C libraries based on the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT (now Apple) Inc. The libraries consist of everything from foundation classes, such as dictionaries and arrays, to GUI interface classes such as windows, sliders, buttons, etc. In the new 0.8 version, the graphics/window interface was completely revamped. New functionality was added to make things faster and eventually implement Quartz compatibility. There is now a window server backend for Windows computers, although it is in a very alpha state. The most important applications written in GNUstep so far are the GNUstep Workspace and the GNUstep Mail Application.

When NeXT, Inc. sold its business to Apple, the NeXT/OpenSTEP operating systems went unsupported. New hardware emerged in the x86 market, and NeXT was not able to boot successfully anymore (among others, problems with the CD-rom drivers, while the last CPU it supported was the Pentium Pro). However, a few NeXT "die hards" have managed to boot OpenSTEP under VMWare, the x86 runtime application. You can find instructions here and here on how to run OpenSTEP under Linux and Windows' VMWare respectively (screenshots included). Moreover, Atomic Object, Inc. released a SVGA OpenSTEP display driver for VMWare (although the graphics VMWare specs are not publicly available), so now the OS is almost fully supported by VMWare, even so unofficially. On a related note, the GnuSTEP project moves in a faster pace lately, trying to implement the OpenSTEP and MacOSX's Cocoa APIs.