Étoilé

[draconian]

Etoile intends to be an innovative GNUstep based user environnement built
from the ground up on highly modular and light components with project and
document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own
workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications),
Components etc. Flexibility and modularity on both User Interface and code
level should allow us to scale from PDA to computer environment.

http://www.freshports.org/x11/etoile/

http://etoileos.com/

[draconian]

FYI: If someone was willing to make this PBI, Mr. David Chisnall, one of the developers of Étoilé, said on the Etoile-dev mailinglist that he would be happy to help with any problems the PBI encounters. They have a lower traffic packaging list (etoile-packaging AT gna DOT org) for people interested in packaging Etoile for their favorite systems.

[draconian]

Was there ever any luck making a PBI?

[Peter2121]

I vote for this PBI too ;)

[Beanpole]

We have been working on trying to get Etoile into PC-BSD as one of the unsupported desktop environments, but are running into a few issues.

1) It appears that simply installing the port does not completely finish the install. The script "setup.sh" also needs to be modified (quite a bit) and run before the binary for starting Etoile is placed into /usr/local/bin. This is not helpful for an automated build process because we will have to maintain/update any scripts that we modify for our installation process. Minor modifications, such as to path variable(s), are not that big of an issue and we can make minor changes like that easily.

2) Once the Etoile installation is complete. Is there a specific place that the system/user preferences have to be saved? I ask this because it appears that the when I try to start the DE, it fails at finding the preferences files (I think) and returns to the GDM login screen. For other window managers that did this, we just needed to add a basic preferences file into the users home directory to get it to start up, so I am guessing it is the same issue here.

If you want to try to get it working yourself, you can download the latest 9.1 snapshot (5/5/12) and install the Etoile system package. In addition to modifying and running "/usr/local/GNUstep/System/Tools/setup.sh", you will need to add a GDM login entry to /usr/local/share/xsessions to let GDM try log you in (should point to /usr/local/bin/etoile). If you can document the steps you had to take to get it working, please post that info here and I can try to get that put in to our build process here.

[Beanpole]

Just an update:
The system package for Etoile has been removed from PC-BSD due to the FreeBSD ports for Etoile being depreciated and removed from lack of maintainership/updating.

If somebody steps up and takes responsibility for maintaining/fixing the FreeBSD port for Etoile (I.E. returning it to the FreeBSD ports tree), we will once again try to make Etoile one of the available DE's in PC-BSD.