4. Additional Installation

4.1 Environment Setup

You need to make sure your environment is properly setup in order to compile and run GNUstep software. The steps to setup your environment differ slightly depending on your filesystem layout.

There is a way of setting up your environment that always works: sourcing the ‘GNUstep.sh’ shell script before using GNUstep. The shell script ‘GNUstep.sh’ is located in the Makefile package; you may want to add it to your shell startup file (such as ‘.profile’). For instance, if you installed GNUstep with the default filesystem layout in ‘/usr/local’, then adding

. /usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

in your ‘.profile’ file will work. Note the period at the beginning of the line, and the space between the period and the following path. If you installed GNUstep somewhere else, you need to replace ‘/usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh’ with the path to your ‘GNUstep.sh’ script. Another typical location is ‘/usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles’, which is the default location of your ‘GNUstep.sh’ script when gnustep-make is configured with the GNUstep layout. The script defines environment variables that are needed to find GNUstep files and executables.

Users of csh need to use the ‘GNUstep.csh’ script. Read the make package ‘README’ for more info. Some systems, like GNU/Linux have an ‘/etc/profile.d’ directory where scripts can be executed automatically. If you want to set up GNUstep for every user on your system, you can try copying/linking the ‘GNUstep.sh’ there. For csh or tcsh, try

source /usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.csh

Finally, in most filesystem configuration it’s also possible to manually set up your environment by setting PATH, the linker library paths and the GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES variable (instead of using ‘GNUstep.sh’). For example, on GNU/Linux (with a default GNUstep installation), instead of sourcing ‘GNUstep.sh’ you could manually add the Tools directories to your PATH:

PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

manually add ‘/usr/local/lib’ to your ‘/etc/ld.so.conf’ file (don’t forget to run ldconfig every time you install a library), and set the environment variable GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES when you want to compile something:

GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES=/usr/local/share/GNUstep/Makefiles

4.2 GNUstep Home

Your home GNUstep directory should be created automatically the first time you use a GNUstep tool or application. This is where user defaults are kept as well as other user configuration files. User installed apps, libraries, etc are also here (if the default user directory is used). By default this is the directory ‘GNUstep’ under your home directory, but you can change this (see the gnustep-make installation documentation).

4.3 Time Zone

In most cases, GNUstep should be able to determine your time zone, if you have already set it up correctly when setting up your computer. However, in some cases this might fail or the correct information may not be available. You can set it manually using the GNUstep defaults utility to set Local Time Zone to your local time zone. Type something like defaults write NSGlobalDomain "Local Time Zone" GB. Where GB is a time zone abbreviation.

See ‘/usr/local/lib/GNUstep/Libraries/gnustep-base/Versions/1.21/Resources/NSTimeZones/zones/’ (or equivalent on your system depending on your filesystem layout) for typical time zones.

4.4 GNUstep deamons

Set up your system to execute some GNUstep deamons. This is optional because if you don’t do this, they will be started automatically when you run your first GNUstep app:

• gdomap - Put this in a system startup file, like ‘/etc/rc.local’ or ‘/etc/rc.d/rc.local’ (customize for your system)

  if [ -f /usr/local/bin/gdomap ]; then /usr/local/bin/gdomap fi

• gdnc - Start after sourcing ‘GNUstep.sh’ (e.g. in .profile)
• gpbs - Same as with gdnc, make sure X-Windows is running.
• make_services - Not a deamon, but a tool that needs to be run everytime you install a new Application or service. This is NOT run automatically.

if [ `gdomap -L GDNCServer | grep -c Unable` == 1 ]; then
  echo "Starting GNUstep services..."
  gdnc
  gpbs
fi
make_services

This document was generated by Adam Fedor on December 24, 2013 using texi2html 1.82.