Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The GNU Workspace

Thanks to the continuous improvement by the HURD team and thanks to a nice hacking evening with Matt Rice, quite some improvement was done on GNUstep with HURD. I was already able to have some rough results years ago, but then for a long time everything was unusably broken.

The only major thing to do was to set the global default NSPortIsMessagePort to NO.

In the screenshot we can see a GNU Workspace: done with GNUstep on GNU/Hurd.
GWorkspace is running, the upcoming FTP 0.2 can be seen too and it works well, meanign that distributed objects do work. Terminal.app works pretty fine as does the Rich text editor Ink. Not seen here, but ProjectCenter and Gorm do work too.

Cool is the front most application: Vespucci, the GAP browser which has at its core SimpleWebKit, runs too and loads an URL. This means that sockets, port, and rendering do work on Hurd well enough! Although still quite primitive, a browser on Hurd...

I have noticed some instabilities, with some applications starting up twice or closing and I suspect it is due to the applications not correctly registering with the daemons or with their ports dying.

3 comments:

Sean said...

Looks fantastic. Great to see all this progress being done with both GNUStep and HURD.

I really hope Viengoos, Coyotos, or L4 really come into their own and develop into a mature microkernel, overseeing the porting and integration of great software like this is going to be absolutely exciting.


One day, we'll all have our own completely free machines. Liberated Machines, if you will.

Xirtus said...

this is really interesting. did you try haiku yet? it's based on BEOS, which was NEXTSTEP's competetor, and apple wanted to buy it before it bought NEXTSTEP...

Haiku is the complete rebuild, and it uses another kernel as well, but I'd like to see HURD with haiku.

Riccardo said...

defaults NSGlobalDomain NSPortIsMessagePort NO