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:
-
NEXTSTEP 3.x User + Developer
- The build is known to be successful on 3.3 Intel-Mach. I can't comment
on whether it will work on other versions and/or architectures but, in
principle, it should work on any 3.x and higher.
-
An X Server for NEXTSTEP
- e.g. - Pencom's
coXist or Intuitiv
Systems cub'X. There are also some public domain servers for m68k systems
that may work for that architecture.
-
X Development Tools (libraries,
headers) - These are available
with the developer versions of the commercial X servers for NEXTSTEP, coXist
and cub'X. I have built and used X11R5 versions of the libraries using
a patched version of the MIT sources. These patches will be made available
for download as soon as possible.
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XView is obsolete and support for it will not be present in wxWidgets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:
-
X11R5 Libraries and Headers
(copyright allowing)
-
wxXt 1.66d Libraries
-
wxXt 1.66d Utilities
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