[plug] Linux developement

[Leon Brooks]

Hi Brad! Here at last! Welcome! (-:

Try to drag Colin in with you - Der Spatz seem to think that he has some
Linux leanings these days, and havig seen some of his code, PERL might
well be his dream language.

Bradley Woodward wrote:
> How do you profession linux programmers work?

Proffessional? Hmm. For pay? (-:

I do all my work in my $HOME directory. If I'm tinkering briefly with a
source RPM, I just su (lazy) and work in /usr/src/; plans for more
extensive tinkering usually include copying the sources back into my
$HOME somewhere and changing their ownership to suit. I normally only
use su if there's no other way of if I'm in a tearing rush and can't
take time to do a thing properly (which usually means that later I'll
have to do it again).

> Also, I need some help getting a handle on GUI development.  What are
> some of the standard resources for this?

glade, Kdevelop and other GUI tools are one place to start. There are
many good links from the gnome and KDE websites. If it's 3D you're
after, try mesa3d.org.

You're generally better off doing GUI through some kind of widely
portable library (SDL or better) than direct, as there's better
abstraction from the OS and hardware. There are also libraries specific
to games development (2D and 3D) and tools like Blender for object
design.

Higher (more or less) level languages like Python, LISP (scheme and
friends) and TCL, plus difficult-to-categorise languages like PERL often
have bindings to specific graphics libraries at various levels including
Qt (think KDE), GTK (think Gnome), and OpenGL.

There are also oddments like Tk, which seems to have escaped being
merely the last two and a half letters of TCL/Tk and gone on to greater,
or at least weirder, things like PERL/Tk. If you want to throw small GUI
tools together fast, try TCL/Tk with a kick-starter like Visual TCL or
Visual Gypsy. There are also a few command-line gui tools like xmessage
to make scripts a little friendlier.

-- 
Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?