wxWidgets for Xt - Building on NEXTSTEP
 

Introduction

NEXTSTEP differs from most modern UNIX systems by virtue of the fact that it doesn't natively use the X window system for it's GUI. Luckily, X windows is available on NEXTSTEP through X servers that run alongside NEXTSTEP's Display Postscript window-server. This makes building wxXt on NEXTSTEP only slightly more involved than usual. Hopefully this page will clarify what you need before you start and how you then go about building wxXt.

Requirements

To build wxXt your NEXTSTEP system should meet the following requirements:

Before Building

Some minor patching to the wxXt sources is currently required - this is primarily because NEXTSTEP 3.3 has a few holes compared to the standard UNIX/POSIX environment and needs a little help. OPENSTEP 4.x may fill in some, if not all, of these holes. Again, the required patches will be made available as soon as possible.

Building

Once you have applied the patches you can build the wxXt libraries, utilities and samples in the usual, documented, way. Note, however, that some of the utilities and samples currently don't build. wxBuilder certainly won't and neither will Hello. These problems are being worked on.

Other Platforms and Compilers

If you have one of the commercial X Server + Development Kits for NEXTSTEP that support Motif then you may be able to build wxWidgets for Motif with few problems. This has not been tested. Similarly if you are using an m68k system with one of the public domain X servers that support XView you may be able to build wxWidgets for XView. Again, this has not been tested but is likely to be difficult. XView is obsolete and support for it will not be present in wxWidgets 2 - for this reason and others this option is not recommended.

wxWidgets for Xt has been successfully built using NeXT's cc. It should also be possible to build wxXt using the freely available distributions of GNU's gcc for NEXTSTEP. This will be tested as soon as time allows. 

Binaries

The standardisation of the NEXTSTEP platform means that binaries should relatively easy to distribute. NEXTSTEP 3.3 Intel-Mach binaries of the following: may be made available for download some time in the future, time and server-space allowing.

End Note

Building wxWidgets on NEXTSTEP isn't a straight-forward proposition as of yet, so don't expect to get away without a couple of headaches. Hopefully this situation will improve over time.

wxWidgets now has a presence on NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody (albeit a small one), which is the important thing and there is a possibility of this presence widening. Please see wxWidgets for NeXT for more details.


Arthur Tetzlaff-Deas, 26/6/1998