I haven’t blogged in a while, probably because I was too busy. I’ve been working, started to take some university classes (Philosophy & Computer Science), and… I’m doing most of my work on Mac OS X now. Don’t worry, I’m still a Linux guy – but mostly for work purposes (and out of curiosity) I decided to ask Zend for a Macbook when my Thinkpad was starting to die.
Unfortunately the negative side effect of this is that I had to put Glista on hold – since I didn’t have a Gtk+ based desktop anymore there wasn’t much point in actively working on it.
However, in the last couple of days (following some patches that came in from ananasik, for whom I immediately gave commit access) my fingers started itching, and I decided to play with porting Glista to OS X – and found this project.
After some hours of tinkering, crashing, building, rebuilding and breaking things again, I now have a somewhat working (albeit ugly, and not so OS X friendly) working Glista.app Application bundle running on my own 32 bit OS X 10.6:
If you’re really up for it, you can get a Disk Image here.
You can also build it from source by checking out http://glista.googlecode.com/svn/branches/osx-support and doing the following:
- Make sure you have all the nescesary build environment (XCode is usually a good start!)
- Install all the gtk-osx tools and libraries including ige-mac-builder and gtk-quartz
- cd into the source directory and run (in a jhbuild shell after installing osx-gtk) ./configure –prefix=$PREFIX
- Note that some things do not work on OS X yet (or will never work) like libunique integration, gtk-spell, libnotify integration etc. – that’s normal for nowRun ‘make’, don’t (!!) run ‘make install’ (well you can, but there’s no need, you’ll just pollute your system
- cd into dist/mac/ and run ‘make dist-mac’. If everything is ok this should create Glista.app in that directory.
- Move that .app into /Applications (or anywhere else) and enjoy!
So far, it looks like it’s going to be a long time before Glista will work smoothly on Mac – and most of it is because Gtk+ is not really that portable, and making it use OS-native widgets and rendering seems to be quite a challenge. I also don’t feel I know enough about the internals of Gtk+, Quartz or OS X in general in order to help with that effort – but who knows, maybe I’ll be able to help somehow?
BTW I’m not sure if that binary will work on anything but OS X 10.6 on Intel 32 bit. If you try, let me know!
