ivucica blog

If you are a Cocoa or Cocoa Touch developer, you may have attempted to use features such as properties in GNUstep, only to be surprised that these don’t seem to be supported. This is because these are Objective-C 2.0 features.

To get the new features, the only way is to use a different compiler called clang. You may have seen this compiler used in newer releases of Xcode. This is a compiler that targets a virtual machine called LLVM before producing native code.

UPDATE May 4th 2011: GCC 4.6 has got the Objective-C 2.0 treatment, and since Debian includes GCC 4.6, I’d recommend you to try compiling your software that way. Not because it’s a better compiler — I have no idea which one works better — but because it’s there. Also, consider compiling GNUstep from trunk using GCC 4.6; it’s rather easy to do. (CC=gcc-4.6 ./configure, whenever compiling a component of GNUstep).

Let’s presume you managed to run an Objective-C program with GNUstep; that is, let’s presume you are aware of Project Center, or GNUmakefiles. If you are didn’t use GNUmakefiles, you should know that Project Center generates these in order to build your app.

Now you want to switch to clang, and you want to do so on your favorite operating system, Debian GNU/Linux.
(more…)

To get a GNU/Linux to reboot properly and not hang in the final step, you need to pass another parameter to the kernel. You need to pass reboot=pci to Linux.

Currently, Debian and Debian-derivatives such as Ubuntu tend to use Grub2 as the bootloader, by default. You need to:

• edit the /etc/default/grub configuration file, as root, and using your favorite editor
• find line that looks similar to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”"
• if it contained anything inside quotes, don’t delete those commands!
• into the quotes, add reboot=pci but do not delete existing text
• back in command line, run update-grub as root user

It should now work flawlessly!

Image: unplgdd.com

I really fell in love Mac OS X. Numerous UI innovations, consistency, cool design all combined help me be more productive. It can get slow occasionally: all those cool things that help me be more productive obviously come at a price.

A few days ago I successfully installed Debian lenny on my MacBook (hardware revision 6,1). More importantly, it managed to boot (suffice to say, I spent entire Sunday getting it to that stage). Unfortunately, since wireless card drivers don’t work out of the box, and I didn’t have ethernet handy until today, it just stood there on the hard drive.

Imagine my surprise when I fired up the Epiphany browser and the home page (Debian.org) opened instantly. Imagine my surprise when I realized everything else was also hyper fast. Even Firefox Iceweasel doesn’t seem to be the memory hog it usually is. Also, I think I was logged in in about 35 sec — and I mean fully logged in. Folks, it may pay off to try Debian on Mac. There isn’t a better designed GUI OS than Mac; there isn’t a more customizable, but consistent-as-far-as-linux-goes and fluid-as-far-as-updates-go OS than Debian.

But, this may be just a “side effect” of a fresh install. Who knows how it’ll behave after some … production use. And copy move of my old home folder from the old laptop. Who knows — maybe I just shouldn’t transfer the dot-folders with settings.

On the other hand, I’ll stay in Mac OS for most of the time, simply because … well, if all goes well, you’ll know in a couple of days

By the way, note the lack of comparison with Windows.

In case you’re looking for GNOME’s graphical equivalent of “du” command which provides a tree overview of disk usage of each directory, and you are a Debian user, know that program Baobab is located in package gnome-utils.

Trying to insall Debian on Mac OS X. If you plan on doing so, familiarize yourself with following concepts: rEFIt, gptsync, MBR/GPT hybrid partition table. And .. prepare to reboot a few times. This is with Debian Lenny CD1 only; amazingly it has no gptsync in default install and its install is completely confused by Macs. Hopefully they’ve ironed it out in Squeeze a bit.

Finally!

Finally you can grab non-(developer-only) Google Chrome for Linux as it enters beta. Available for Debian (YAY!), Ubuntu, Fedora ( ) and OpenSUSE (hmm). Go and get it!