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GTK+ for BeOS Update 77

Posted by Hemos from the porting-is-fun dept.
BugMaster ChuckyD writes to us with the latest info about the GTK+ porting to BeOS effort. Alpha stage, so it's still crashy-the-crash guy, but the screen shots look sweet. I'm going to have put this on my Be machine later.
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GTK+ for BeOS More

GTK+ for BeOS

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  • Neither, because they both retained editorial control.

    No, slashdot is not freshmeat.

    No, you dont see news stories on freshmeat.

    I dont use linux (or any unix) on my desktop - though a "long term goal" is to migrate over. So I dont read freshmeat randomly - there are too many gminsweapers and the like to weed through.. I proably wont randomy go there when I do uses gnome on my desktop, either.

    Apache is important. I maintain some sites that run linux and use apache. Its nice to know.

    A Be gtk port is less important (to me) but there are proably lots of Be users who dont run linux and gnome, but like some of what they see. They would be interested in something like this.

    Besides, its not like there is a hundred stories a day on ./ Do you realy think that these displaced something more important?

  • (1) it's commercial
    (2) it's not Unix
    (3) it's partially owned by Microsoft

    Essentially, OS/2 doesn't exist in the "Linux world" (as you put it), so it's no real shock that Slashdot isn't all over an OS that most people aren't even aware is still in production.

    (I know it's unfair, but OS/2's fate as a nitch OS has been sealed for a long time. Blame IBM, Microsoft, fate, timing, whatever. Expecting "News for Nerds" to pickup on news which only interests what can be fairly called a legacy user base is a little odd. There's not much AS/400 or VMS news here either, and those plaforms are growing much faster than OS/2 is right now.)
    --

  • Oog, through misfortune, I had to work with OS/2 2.1 -- **$300** for the TCP/IP stack. And one wonders why so many people run Windows NT.

    And the WPS was so unstable that we ended up booting into command prompts on the server, but that's a different story...
    --

  • Yuck (Score:1)

    by mlk ( 18543 )
    Sorry to the people who ported this, but I feel this has to be said...

    YUCK, it's not using BeOSes L&F.
    One of the reasons I left Linux was the lack of the standardised L&F, yeah there is 'GNOME' and 'KDE' etc, but not all apps use it.

    Mlk
  • would there not be a speed reduction in using this?
    Plus how many 'themes' are perfect?
  • Windows does. (Some people call MFC a C++ wrapper, but MFC is more of a terribly designed spaghetti-code application framework, so I don't think it counts)

    Anyway, it doesn't matter at all what language the GUI source code is in (I'm willing to bet the majority of GUI's are written in C) --- the point being made was that there are bindings for many languages. You don't "link to" C code to get to the GUI, you link to a dynamic library. A dynamic library isn't "C" or ANY language for that matter, its assembly opcodes - the only "C" there may be the calling convention for the functions, but that doesn't restrict anyone linking to the library to C. You could write BASIC code that links to GTK+.

  • Yes, OS/2 is commercial, but then, so is BeOS.

    Or did you think that $59 price tag was to be donated to the FSF?

    Hmm?

    Secondly, since when does an OS need to be Unix to be mentionable? Clue: Linux is not Unix! Its origins are not from the BSD school because the kernel sprouted from the head of Linus. Just because a distribution *looks like* System V at the command line, doesn't make it a descendent of any of the BSD lineage.

    Thirdly, Microsoft pulled out of OS/2 a looooong time ago and stole a bunch of code (why hasn't IBM sued yet?) in the process to make Win9x and NT.

    Lastly, as a former OS/2 user/hacker, I must remind you that posting non-facts here can make you look silly.

    As for who to blame, I place the blame squarely on IBM's shoulders. They refused to fight the FUD with facts and had the WORST advertising campaign known to mankind. To this day, they have no idea what kind of decent OS they had or what kind of challenge they could have given Evil Bill. Remember that this was an OS that was full 32 bit, had drag-n-drop capabilities that NO version of Windoze has to this day, a decent scripting/batch language, and better DOS support, and this was back in the days of Win3.11 being the best out of Redmond.

    OS/2 is dead because IBM eats its children.
  • (Late I know)

    Note that I was referring to the fetishes of Slashdot editors more that I was talking about OS/2. I should have added [(4) It's not a new OS], which explains Slashdot's fixation on Be, Mac OS X, and so on.

    But to address your points in particular:
    - Nobody here thinks Be or Solaris or OS/400 is free software.
    - Linux is a nearly perfect clone of Unix. Apologies if calling it unix offends your delicate sensibilities, but most people consider it a unix variant.
    - Microsoft didn't steal any OS/2 code. At the time of the breakup, both MS and IBM got rights to each others projects - DOS, Windows 3, and OS/2 2.
    - I didn't attempt to post any facts - just 100% opinion. Babbling a bunch of nonsense about System V not being BSD and accusing Microsoft of stealing something that they own looks pretty silly too.

    --
  • Lots of OS/2 users submit OS/2-related articles that are of the same calibre as BeOS and Mac articles, yet they never get printed. There was never anything for Win32-OS/2, never anything about Warpstock, nothing about EverBlue, Gimp, XFree86/2, SciTech, you name it.

    That's why all us OS/2 users think that Slashdot is anti-OS/2.

  • I'm amazed at how good those fonts look. Just one glance at that proves to me that X needs to get anti-aliased font rendering.. I don't care if it has to be a built-in part of GTK+! I just wish I knew enough to get it in there on my own..
  • Well, what is there to SAY about Win32-OS/2? Zilch. About Warpstock etc I agree, however, I could care less about running Unix/Linux/Windows apps on OS/2. I'd prefer (and DO) to run native Warp programs.
    BTW, not long ago, Jerry Pournelle made the statement that Warp advocates made it so unpleasant for people to write about Warp that eventually no one did. We see the same thing now happening with Linux.
    Nothing is stopping Warp users from starting up their own site a la Slashdot, BeNews or BeosCentral, is there? Know anyone who would be willing to host and run a site like that (please don't even mention Tim Martin and Warpcity!)?
  • Funny...I get the same feeling as Timur.
    Nobody seems to want to even acknowledge that OS/2 exists in the Linux world.

    I remember seeing ONE good blurb about OS/2's WPS...
  • Slashdot, as I understand it, != Linux news.
    Slashdot is "news for nerds" or so it claims. And nerds are semi-interested in OS developments, yes?

    I know that at least one or 2 interesting stories about OS/2 have been submitted to Slashdot, yet never get posted.
    Yet some yahoo goes around asking about modems for Linux and the like and _that_ gets posted.
  • I dunno about anti-OS/2. I mean, it does, at least, point to Warpcast and OS/2 News&Rumors.

    ON THE OTHER HAND, somebody submits a GTK+ on BeOS story and that gets printed.
    A story on GTK+ on OS/2 was submitted and NOTHING showed up on Slashdot.

    BeOS is cool too, but there are a heck of a lot more OS/2 users than BeOS right now!
  • I agree, the antialiasing in BeOS is really nice. The antialiasing in MS windows look just over-blurry when used on small fonts, isnt even active on normal sizes but works fairly well on big text. The BeOS antialiasing on the other hand looks just perfect on any fontsize.
  • There are OS/2 sites out there. OS/2 SuperSite [os2ss.com] and OS2.org [os2.org] are two I can name off the top of my head. That's not the point.

    The subhead at the top of the page says "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Unfortunately, it usually ends up "News for kernel hackers. Linux stuff that matters." The only reason this BeOS story got posted is because the subject (GTK+) tied back to Linux. That's the way it is for all BeOS stories. I sometimes think this is how they determine what gets posted:
    • Linux: Always!
    • Windows: Only if it's an Evil Empire story
    • BeOS: If they can grep "linux" or "open source", and find something
    • OS/2: ... (blank stare) ... Ooh, look! The next story mentions Linus Torvalds!
    To be fair, Linux gets (and deserves) far more press than OS/2 does. Outside of existing OS/2 shops, Linux is more relevant. As far as Slashdot's OS coverage goes, however, I'd rate them only slightly above InfoWorld, who have recently trampled "reviews" of BeOS 4.5 and OS/2 Warp Server for e-Commerce on their way to yet another "Linux will rule the world" column.

    Keith Russell
    OS != Religion
  • Cool! Now if only my fonts looked that good.

    And... what's the graphing widget?

  • Re:gimp (Score:1)

    by Tsk ( 2863 )
    You should wait for the native gimp port
  • Each GTK+ toplevel window runs it's own thread in GTK+ for BeOS. GDK is thread-safe. Since the compiler on BeOS is gcc and g++, of course you can use C just fine. It is the higher-level libraries which are written in C++, like BeOS's native interface toolkit. Mixing C and C++ isn't a problem.

    Others could port Gtk-- to beos, but it's not a priority at all.

    The BeOS version does run themes, although the only one so far that I've tried is ThinIce. It works wonderfully.

  • gimp (Score:1)

    by tweek ( 18111 )
    I can't wait for this to get stable so i can have gimp up in BeOS. I like moho but I know gimp hella better.
  • Oh yes! The Metrowerks->GCC switch!

    Well, cool. More apps for another cool platform! Get porting, boys!
  • I wonder what (horrible?) thing GTK+ will do to the BeOS' nice OO and threading. Is GTK+ thread-safe? Not apparently (see 5.2 in the FAQ -- "thread aware" -- uh huh).

    And BeOS likes to programmed with C++, not C ... is there any sort of wierdness or impedance mismatches that happen as a result? Is Gtk-- going to be ported?

    For porting apps from Linux, it might be useful, somewhat -- at least some of the UI code will carry over.

    Does the BeOS version support themes?
  • Doesn't Mozilla use GTK+?
  • I think Qt would be a better fit for BeOS: http://www.troll.no/products/qt.html [troll.no]

    It is based on C++ and has a much nicer API. Unfortunately, though, its license has been a subject of controversy:
    Red Hat's Marc Ewing speaks out on Qt License [slashdot.org]
    QT Goes OpenSource [slashdot.org]

    It doesn't hurt that the BeOS native compiler is EGCS [which will soon (already?) become the official gcc compiler].

  • Everyone else seems to have picked up on this, but this is now getting crazy.

    Why do we have Freshmeat.net? Why do we have Slashdot.org? I thought that they were two different places, with two different themes. But now, all we have is the same stuff on both sites!

    I'm not in a position to question Rob and Jeff's editorial decisions. After all, it is still their site and their's to do with as they please. But could we get some clarification as to what we can expect to see here? If Slashdot keeps going like this, we might as well autoforward to Freshmeat.net

    Just my $.02
  • GTK+ with Anti Aliased Fonts (and not even MS's crappy implementation). I never thought I'd see the day...

  • indeed, the GIMP screenshot was beautiful.. having never actually seen BeOS, it just looked cool. I'll have to check it out one of these days...
  • I'm getting tired of people flipping out when one story in 50 commits an unforgivable crime of being related to a new software release.

    Freshmeat, in the last week, has posted over 200 software version updates. Similarly, Slashdot has posted a huge amount of news and information. If you cannot cope with the occasional overlap, you are free to download Slashdot's source code and offer an alternative news site completely devoid of news about software updates. Otherwise, cope.
  • why do you care so much? geez, if you don't like the content, don't read the site.

    /me can't imagine someone spending all the time to write that in the first place.

    get a clue.
  • Can you explain how an operating system "likes to programmed with C++"?
  • Yes lets turn this into a C/C++ flame fest! You outdated C people against you memory leaking C++ people. The truth is the two are so inteoperable, if you know C++ and some C library stuff, you know it all. If you don't take the object thing too far (ahem MFC) A C++ API is a better way to go. But GTK being ported to Be is okay long as it remains for PORTING purposes only. No point in such a nice API like Be's being sullied with Unix stuff.
  • I agree that C++ fits naturaly into the GUI model of programming. (Ditto Java, and likely many other OO languages, although GUIs weren't around when I was programming in Simula-67).

    Which is why I've used it the last few times I had to do Motif development. Pretty easy to wrap classes around the Motif stuff you need. Heck, I even used C++ to do X Windows 10 stuff, back when.

    C makes sense in some problem domains, and I'll grant that too many C++ programmers tend to write unreadable code, but graphics and GUIs are domains that practically beg for an OO approach. (And yes, you can do OO in C, but why?)

  • There is a native port going on. I would expect that to be much better than any GTK based port, since GTK applications can't integrate themselves into BeOS properly, let alone use the facilities offered.

    For one example, threads -- the GTK framework isn't thread safe, not to mention actually having integrated thread support.


    John
  • I am not sure BeOS users want to end up in the mess that Linux X users are in right now ( 20 different GUI toolkits ranging from something as shity as Athen to very nice stuff like QT )
  • BeOS has an excellent one. But wait -- since BeOS supports the BeOS API, why not use that -- it's much better featured than Qt in many regards...
    John

  • On the other hand, you can't use any C++ features such as namespaces, templates, operator overloading etc.

    C is an excellent low level systems programming language. C++ is just about usable for GUI's, but its a lot better than C for that sort of thing. p.s. you don't need to do thread management and locking manually to program BeOS.


    John
  • You can download GTK+ 1.21 for XFree86/2 from ftp://24.2.168.186/pub/os2/unix/ xfree86/ports/gtk/ [24.2.168.186]. Granted, it doesn't run on the OS/2 desktop, but that will change once EverBlue [netlabs.org] is done. Don't expect Slashdot to mention it, of course. With all their pro-BeOS anti-OS/2 stories, you'd think that there are more BeOS users than OS/2 users (there aren't).
  • We may be able to see in the future GTK+ becoming the defacto standard cross-platform GUI toolkit. It is fairly easy to program, and has lots of language bindings. Thats one key aspect. You don't need to use C++ to program GTK+. This more than anything will draw developers to the toolkit.
  • Well, I had a kneejerk reaction to Apache 1.3.9 being announced here too, so you're not alone. This announcement isn't a software announcement, though. This port is in pre-alpha stage, so it's 'developers only', and what better way to attract developers to a worthy project than announce it on /.?

    It can be debated whether this announcement is 'worthy', but I don't care. It's not Freshmeat material, it belongs here if anywhere.

  • Well for one thing freshmeat.net appears to be a linux only software site, and a search for BeGTK yielded 0 entries, so your point is not valid in this particular case.

    Although the majority of the posters to /. advocate linux-for-everything, I can assure you this not true of all slashdot readers, so many /. readers don't ever visit freshmeat. The maintainers of this site clearly have a linux bias, but what is wrong with the occaisional story that is of general interest to computer nerds (who BTW are not exclusively linux zealots ;-)
  • the BeAPI is written in C++, thats how.
  • Yes. If anything I would love to have QT for BeOS.
    However, I don't see anything wrong with existing GUI API - in fact, this kind of setup will provide consistency across all the apps on BeOs- something that Linux lacks.
  • How much work would it be to integrate the changes required for OS/2 into the main GTK+ tree? Is it all build process stuff?

    -Shawn
  • What ? Are you mad ?

    C++ fits naturally into GUI model of programming.
    I used C with Motif and EZWGL dev ... and it simply sucks as compared to say QT way of doing things.

    I don't understand people fascination with C ...
    Right tool for the right job.
  • Could you explain what is so crappy about MS anti-aliased fonts ??
    They seem to work very well and look very nice.

  • I don't understand people's fascination with slamming a particular language. Like calling programming in language X insane (ring a bell?).

    /mill

  • Off of the top of my head, windows does. It just has c++ wrappers, just like gtk+. (he was talking about gtk+, not gnome.)
  • The BeOS provides a number of "supposedly easy" APIs (InterfaceKit, ApplicationKit, StorageKit, etc). The docs are available online [be.com]. Other useful information is in the developer library [be.com].

    Enjoy.

    Brian
  • Very un-informed when it comes to BeOS..
  • this should be a nice (lethal?) combination. BeOS's GUI was cool, but just think of all the great themes you can use. think people will download the beos theme? ;-)

    ----------
    Have FreeBSD questions?
  • Beatiful?

    I think it looks crappy as compared to look of native BeOS toolkit ...

    Really , people, don't you see that default GTK is butt-ugly ??
  • I'm sure there were some changes made to the code, but porting Unix/X apps to OS/2 must be pretty easy, because people have been doing it for years (long before Linux became popular) and there are quite a few apps being ported (namely Gimp).

    But I wouldn't personally know. Given the common hostility of Linux/X developers towards OS/2, I'm sure a lot of OS/2 programmers haven't even asked. Look at how difficult it's been to get Mozilla for OS/2 into the main tree.

  • Uhhh. I have rarely seen anything "anit-OS/2" on Slashdot. Maybe because so few people care or use it anymore. I, for one, DO use it and plan to be at Warpstock Europa '99........and I also use Be.
  • Or...::gasp:: it's Hemos in disguise! :-)

    Mycroft
  • (Hint, Hint) Who are they both owned by? Which one wants to be the one at the next general meeting that DIDN'T run "X" story?

    Mycroft
  • The point is, with library that has language bindings, the option is there to use whatever language you want. I have seen VERY few C++ based libraries that had bindings for any language besides C++.

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