Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

http://etoileos.com/etoile/

by adamnemecek • 13 years ago

101 43 13 years ago

etoileos.com

flym4n• 13 years ago

It says 'PDA' in the first paragraph. That makes it looks old

Blahah• 13 years ago

616c• 13 years ago

But the last code edit was 11 hours ago. Web page is not so important to me.

http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/

noobermin• 13 years ago

I remember trying to install and run this 2 years ago. I checked up on it from time to time, but since it seemed dead I stopped following it(although there seems to be code edit that was an hour ago[1]).

[1] http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/

rjzzleep• 13 years ago

yeah it's old. personally i'm wondering how complicated it would be to have a transparent wineish layer for running mac binaries on linux. the kernel modules are i guess the biggest problem, but last i remember they were fairly heavily based on their freebsd counterparts(well, at least many years ago)

i wish vmware workstation in linux was as good as the mac and windows counterparts ... then i could just run linux as my main os on my mba again

Sanddancer• 13 years ago

The biggest problem would be the binary loader. OS X uses the Mach-O executable format, as opposed to the ELF format used in other unixes. There is a project to get Mach-O binaries to be usable under other unixes,, but it looks to be a ways off still -- http://darling.dolezel.info/en/Darling

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

I really don't think that a binary loader would be that big of an issue. Unless I'm missing something, I would say that it would be one of the easier things. I'd guess that implementing all the frameworks would be the worst part.

barrkel• 13 years ago

There isn't a whole lot of magic in loaders. They do much the same job as linkers, except instead of files on disk, they set up pages in memory. All the import slots are filled with references to all the corresponding exports, until all imports are satisfied; and all the relocations are adjusted based on load location. There are a couple more wrinkles for optimization and extra functionality, but that's approximately it.

james2vegas• 13 years ago

Doesn't appear to be Linux only at all.

robert-wallis• 13 years ago

Apple has a patent on the Dock. https://www.google.com/patents/US7434177

And clickable pull-down menus in the menu bar. https://www.google.com/patents/USD629412

The legal system strikes again.

auvi• 13 years ago

Wow, I was surprised to see that Apple has patents on those, especially the one on pull-down menus. Wasn't pull-down menus there in some old Xerox computer?

sbuk2• 13 years ago

Pull-downs are entirely Apple's:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_P...

and

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t...

Argorak• 13 years ago

Ubuntu has a dock-like-launcher and pull-downs in the menu bar. Interesting.

huxley• 13 years ago

The menu patent is for translucent menus "large, lower rectangle that conveys the impression of a translucent/transparent surface"

chc• 13 years ago

I am not a patent lawyer, but the second patent appears to be for an interface where windows can situationally be rendered translucent, not for the general idea of pull-down menus.

mindslight• 13 years ago

So that affects how the project is hosted, big whoop. Another "amazing" property of platforms without a gatekeeper!

(PS- pretending the lawlers' games are important just serves to propagate their influence)

throwawaykf034• 13 years ago

The Dock patent is specifically on the dynamic resizing and repositioning of icons when moused over. A plain collection of icons won't infringe this patent.

The second patent is a design patent, which means you'd have to have a menu exactly like that to infringe.

Funnily enough, one of the icons in the figures in the first patent is for Internet Explorer. I think I also spied one for Word.

rsynnott• 13 years ago

It's from 1999; at that time, Apple shipped IE.

thrillgore• 13 years ago

I actually never understood the usability behind growing/shrinking the Dock icons. Good icons have enough of a profile to be distinguishable when they're small.

kunai• 13 years ago

Oh shit. Ubuntu better change their menus...

...that they've been using from 2005. Oh, they also really have to change their dock!...

...that they've been using from 2011.

The menu patent is a design patent, so you'd have to have a translucent menubar and menus to infringe. The Dock patent is, I believe, strictly for magnification and behavior, so icons arranged in a row do not infringe.

networked2• 13 years ago

How viable nowadays is cross-platform application or server software development in Objective-C compared to the same in C++? GNUstep appears to be the best (only) solution for the former; is that so?

Edit: To clarify, I'm asking this as a developer who does most work on Linux. My interest in Obj-C is primarily due to its Smalltalk-like message passing mechanism. Edit 2: clarity.

aaronbrethorst2• 13 years ago

There's Apportable for Android (http://www.apportable.com), which—I'm guessing—likely uses Cocotron under the hood: http://www.cocotron.org

But, in general, not very. Objective-C compilers certainly exist for Windows and Linux, but aren't worth much without Apple's frameworks.

conradev• 13 years ago

Apportable does use Cocotron, but they also stitch in various other open source libraries that are found in the iOS runtime (libdispatch, CommonCrypto, etc):

http://www.apportable.com/open_source

bitwize2• 13 years ago

Speak for yourself. I do game dev in objc, with my own framework, and find it infinitely more useful than c++ even without the apple toolkits.

kybernetyk• 13 years ago

I played with GNUStep some time ago and well ...

Simple core foundation applications for the command line are no problem but as soon as you get into GUI land with cocoa the differences start to grow.

IMHO trying out GNUStep is a nice project for a weekend but forget any serious cross platform development ideas.

cturner2• 13 years ago

I played with it last weekend. Not viable. Even the ubuntu packages don't produce a working dev environment. GNUstep is a major, standing lost opportunity for the free-software world. Imagine if the community had just taken openstep and don't a respectable job of this proven platform, instead of life in the wilderness with gnome/kde/unity/etc. Etoile is cool - I'd recommend they focus on making it easy to get a command-line GNUstep dev environment up, and bypass the fiddly IDE tools altogether.

yebyen2• 13 years ago

Just a note, I would not use "Ubuntu doesn't even have" as an argument that something is not viable, since Ubuntu has its roots in Debian and there is a tendency to have old crap in the stable release.

For less popular stuff, even the most current release (trusty) is not likely to be kept up-to-date unless one of the core developers is an Ubuntu user. It's not as bad as Debian (used to be?) and I can't come up with an example off the top of my head of something that I needed that was too old and still is, but the most recent memory was Vim, trying to install YouCompleteMe, they had already come out with Vim 7.4 and the most current release of Ubuntu only had 7.3, with about 600 patches behind current and ~75 patches too few to be supported.

(It works now. This is not a bug report. You should file one if this GNUstep interests you, unless it's really an upstream problem.)

throwawaykf034• 13 years ago

I messed around with GNUstep on Ubuntu around 2011-ish when I tried to port an OS X service to Linux. (I did not touch Etoile, though, as I didn't need a GUI.) I didn't come away with a good impression at all.

It was not very easy to get up and running, the documentation was lacking, requiring digging through many mailing lists, and it didn't support Objective-C 2.0... which was a big pain since the code was in Objective-C 2.0. Some of the libraries didn't even compile, for which I submitted a patch or two that never got accepted. When I finally got the app to compile, it was rather slow, so I abandoned further work.

Looking at the wiki, it apparently still does not properly support Objective C 2.0, and does not even mention plans for things like ARC. I don't think it'll see any adoption until they bring it closer to modern Objective-C style development.

0x09• 13 years ago

The GNUstep Objective-C runtime actually supported ARC before Apple even shipped their implementation: http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2011/07/03/1215/

throwawaykf034• 13 years ago

Hmm, they really should update their wiki, I cannot find a mention of ARC on http://wiki.gnustep.org.

stesch• 13 years ago

When I switched from AmigaOS to Linux in 1995, I expected GNUstep to be ready within a short time after it.

Those were the days …

girvo• 13 years ago

I came across Etoile a few weeks back, posted it in a comment here. Glad to see others have run across it!

For those that think it's a dead project, it's not, check the mailing list. The devs are looking to move to GitHub, so hopefully we'll see more contributors. I'm going to get involved myself, I downloaded the source last night into a VM to have a fiddle :)

ewasylishen• 13 years ago

I'm involved with Étoilé, and am the lead developer on a framework called CoreObject (https://github.com/etoile/CoreObject) - it's an object persistence framework something like CoreData except it's also a DVCS.

We're going to properly launch a website for it and do an alpha release in a few weeks, but thought I would mention it since this is where most of the development on Étoilé is happening right now.

Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

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