Windows Installer

This page describes the installer for loading GNUstep on Windows systems and various other apps that have an installer for Windows. After installing the GNUstep Windows installer, you will have a complete system for compiling and running GNUstep applications.

Introduction

The GNUstep Windows installer is based on the MinGW system and consists of the basic MSYS and MinGW libraries, other library dependancies and the GNUstep Core packages (gnustep-make, gnustep-base, gnustep-gui, and gnustep-back.) The installer installs GNUstep onto most varieties of Windows (see below for tested installations) and sets up the computer to make it easy to run GNUstep applications. It was created with the NSIS installer.

State

Oct 28, 2009: gnustep-system-0.24.0 is a new system installer with all new MinGW libraries, GCC 4.4 and pthreads. There's no core installer for this, so this is only for people who want to compile the latest GNUstep code from SVN themselves.

Aug 27, 2009: gnustep-core-0.23.1 Includes the latest updates to the core libraries.

May 26, 2009: gnustep-system-0.23.0 Now has the crypt library, which was formerly in the gnustep-cairo package. gnustep-core-0.23.0 has the latest release of the core libraries.

Feb 19, 2009: A new developer tools package was released that includes useful tools for developing with GNUstep. These include ssh, svn and cvs for getting source code, as well as autoconf, libtool and other developer tools. Also, we've make a Cairo Backend available. Don't use it though. It does not work. However, if you are itching to figure out why it doesn't work, this package will give you everything you need to install and start debugging!

Dec 22, 2008: The system package has been upgraded to the latest MSYS/MinGW release (as of around Sep 19, 2008), which is rumored to work better on Vista. It also includes a few more libraries such as openssl and gnutls which can be used by GNUstep Base. The 0.22.0 release of the core installer includes the latest core packages (Make 2.0.7, Base 1.18.0, GUI 0.16.0, Back 0.16.0). We have also switch to using libffi instead of ffcall. This is a stable releases for Windows, so future releases in this series should be binary compatible with this one. You may need to recompile/reinstall any GNUstep applications based on older releases.

We recommend you uninstall any previous installers first so you don't have extra unecessary files hanging around, although this is not necessary (although make sure you kill the gdnc and gpbs processes if you don't use the uninstaller). The installer has been tested on XP and Win 2K. It also appears to work on 64-bit systems. Administrator access may be needed to install. It also only sets things up correctly for the current user, not for any other users on the system. Please report any other bugs or issues to us.

Download

For the full environment for compiling and running GNUstep. Install the following packages in order.

• FTP Site
• HTTP Access

Applications, Frameworks and other Libraries

This is just a sample of GNUstep applications that can be packaged on Windows. Please request additional ones if you are interested.

For the 0.23.x series:

• SystemPreferences 1.1.0
• Gorm 1.2.10

Packaging Your Own Applications

• First download and install the NSIS installer
• Edit the top-level makefile of your project and add the line: include $(GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES)/Master/nsis.make
• In an MSYS Shell, go to your project and do the following
• Compile your app: make
• Create the nsis script: make nsis
• Now in Windows navigate to your project folder, right-click on the resulting .nsi file, and select the "Compile NSIS Script" option
• That's all!

Developers

The installer sources are located in SVN at:

http://svn.gna.org/svn/gnustep/tools/installers/trunk/nsis

Please send any patches or improvements to the normal bugs locations.