[plug] Linux developement - a summary

[Bradley Woodward]

On Mon, 07 Aug 2000, Leon Brooks wrote:
> Hi Brad! Here at last! Welcome! (-:

Thanks Leon.  It's mighty good to be here.  Just like the good old OS/2 days, 
except this time the IBM marketing department isn't going to ruin things.  :)

>> 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.

ehehe..  Da Spatz man and Colin are mighty distracted by Very Important 
Things like earning money in one case, and avoiding work at all costs in the 
other.  :)

> Bradley Woodward wrote:
> > How do you profession linux programmers work?
> Proffessional? Hmm. For pay? (-:

I'm going to get my company doing paid Linux work within the next 12 months, 
you just watch!

>> 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).

Ok - I take the hint.  Everybody who replied has said the same thing.  Don't 
do the work in /usr/src, because you're going to be forced to su to root.  
Just su when you need to do make install.  Having said that, I really really 
should have made my /home partition a lot bigger.  doh

> 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.

Kdevelop I have installed, but I've never heard of glade.  I'll have an optic 
later on.

I have to say I'm very impressed by the scope of the libraries available.  
The compilers and IDE's available aren't as polished as they are on Windows, 
I think, but they do exist and are quite functional.  It's quite exciting to 
start something new!

Thanks to everybody who replied.  Just goes to show - learning curves don't 
have to be big and scary.  :)

Cya


> 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.