SPO600 Lab 2

For this weeks lab we will be looking at two Open Source packages from the Free Software Foundation and installing them.
In order to find them I will browse through the GNU project's free software directory at:
http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/GNU

My first choice is GNUstep, it is a graphical editor for Objective-C and it plans to add support for C++ in the future. We will look at the documentation offered through
http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/User/GNUstep/userfaq_toc.html
 in order to install the package.

On Fedora, most of the required packages for this installation are included in the "Development tools" group, so it is recommended to install those first.

If you are not on Fedora, the packages can be found in the installation tutorial and each one has a specific use, you can opt-out of most of them if you do not require the functionality so read carefully what each one does.
http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/User/GNUstep/gnustep-howto_2.html#Preliminaries

I tried installing the different packages and running the application, but I accidentally installed it through the install command, thinking it would work as well. I should have compiled it from source instead so my first attempt did not work.

After my first attempt I went to try a simpler program to see if I could get that to install.
I chose http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Hello which is a modification to the Hello world program everyone writes when they just start programming. It is a demonstrative program meant to educate you. We install it by downloading the source from the provided link. this is a .tar.gz file, which means it is in compressed form.
We can decompress it by using the command
tar -xzf filelocation/filename.tar.gz
After which we install it by executing the following commands:
./configure
make

We can now run our Hello program by typing hello in the appropriate directory.

This is the standard for installing source packages, sometimes the names will be slightly different, for instance ./configuration, view the file names inside the package to see what your specific package requires.

After my success with the Hello program, I downloaded the tar.gz files for GNUstep and used the tar -xvf command to extract them.
After installing the gnustep-make package using ./configure and make, we have to run

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

Then we install the other packages the same way we installed the make package.

We are now ready to run GNUstep, before we do though we have to make sure our environment is set up correctly by running the GNUstep.sh file again with the sh command.

After the compilation we can run the program from the commandline. In class I learned that we should not install the files with root privilege, because it could overwrite the packages already present in Fedora. Instead we can just run the programs from the directories in which we installed them.