Installing GNUstep

So, I have this clean Ubuntu 10.04 installation. Now, all I need are some GNUstep, but which path should a young apprentice walk? There are gnustep packages in the Debian/Ubuntu repository, but after consulting the gnustep mailinglist I'm advised to only install dependencies and then get the GNUstep-core form subversion.

An "up to date" dependency listy wasn't easy to find, but I googled my way and learned that these ones were needed for the 8.04 release so I apt-getted those for starters.


subversion (for downloading GNUstep from svn repository)
gobjc
libxmu-dev
libcairo2-dev (cairo backend)
libart-2.0-dev (art backend)
libxslt1.dev
libtiff4-dev
libgif-dev
libssl-dev
libgmp3-dev
libffcall1-dev
libaspell-dev
libcups2-dev



I then headed over to the subversion repos and checked out the core module

svn co http://svn.gna.org/svn/gnustep/modules/core core

After that, the INSTALL file tells me that I need to run the good old "./configure, make, make install" on the different packages. (make, base, gui, back). So, here I can relax and watch the magic as sourcecode transforms into applications on my screen.. poetry... and nothing for the impatient.
If there are any complains from configure about missing packages, install them . I for example had to throw in libffi to keep him satisfied.
The first major problem came with the installation of the gui package when it complained about libgnustep-base. It seem that you really need to be root here, and have the right environment variables setup. I did this to keep going

$ sudo su

$ . /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

$ make install

Thats it, next time I'll try to get a default desktop. GWorkspace  is the first candidate.