Hello Nikolaus, On 2025-09-26 22:03:15 +0200 H. Nikolaus Schaller <[email protected]> wrote:
> That is great! Thanks. > > But I wonder why this is tied to a specific hardware at all? Testing other great projects like NEXTSPACE, I experimented how it is difficult to propose something agnostic out of the box. I just chose first the Raspberry Pi because: - I could easily test it myself: setting a new SD card with Debian Lite is easier and faster than running the same on a virtual machine. And also one target of the project is the great community of coding learners of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. - And doing so I was able to fix my attention on the project without hardware issue. > Doesn't it suffice to provide Debian packages for different CPU architectures > (arm, arm64, i386, mips and more) to make it an experience for everybody? So > that it is not reinventing Debian installers but just adding a new GUI and > desktop flavour? I do respect the great work of the people who maintain the packages of the Debian distro. In the past, I tried to make such a project with only legacy debian stable packages: it happened that many things were outdated, and when I asked the GNUstep community, the answer was ever to build GNUstep and the apps from the latest sources. So one of the principles that founded the PiSiN project was to build it all from sources as possible. One exception was a Window Maker issue when building the 0.96.0 release. I had to revert to 0.95.9 debian stable package. Another historical reason was that I tried first to enhance existing projects with more apps, like GSDE and NEXTSPACE, and because those projects themself were built from source, it was consistent to not use GNUstep debian packages. Last reason, but not the least, many apps need to be translated: and you know that this means you have often to rebuild the gorm interface, not just substituing the strings. > > I had already experimented such an approach with GSDE and had planned to add > it to our LetuxOS set of GUI variants. It is based on a small > architecture-independent Debian package which tries to download and build > GSDE from sources if installed: > > https://download.goldelico.com/letux-debian-rootfs/debian/dists/bullseye/main/binary-all/letux-gsde_0.20250122101129_all.deb > > This compiled (back then), but unfortunately did not run and I have not found > time yet to investigate why. And I am not sure if the wrapped GSDE build > recipe still works. Did you post an issue to inform Ondrej Florian? Maybe he could help you. > > Anyways, there are some rootfs images with GSDE > https://download.goldelico.com/letux-debian-rootfs/toc1.html besides > QuantumSTEP, LXDE or XfCE4 images and more. You can build a bootable µSD > (tested for RasPi 3B+) using the makesd tool, which formats and partitions a > storage and merges a bootloader and kernel. > It seems attractive. I will try this. Also, I will think of an agnostic derived project: I officialy declare here the new (I hope so) name: 'AGNoStep'. Maybe using Docker? I am sure Ethan will submit us something on this matter. > But your initiative is to be applauded because it is impressive. > Thanks again. > BR, > Nikolaus > >> Am 26.09.2025 um 19:49 schrieb Patrick Cardona <[email protected]>: > >> Hello, > >> I am happy to announce the achievement of the first stable release of the >> Pi Step Initiative desktop. ... -- Patrick Cardona - Pi400 - GNU/Linux (Debian 12 aarch64: RPI OS Lite) Xorg (1:1.7.1-1.2) - libcairo2 (1.16.0-7+rpt1 arm64) Window Maker (0.95.9) - GNU Runtime - GWorkspace (1.1.0 - 02 2025) - Theme: PISIN - MUA: GNUMail (1.4.0)
