Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 14:07:06 10/22/99
Go up one level in this thread
On October 22, 1999 at 12:28:03, Tord Romstad wrote:
>On October 21, 1999 at 23:05:10, Christophe Theron wrote:
>
>>On October 21, 1999 at 21:59:11, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>>
>>>On October 21, 1999 at 18:00:47, Christophe Theron wrote:
>>>
>>>>BTW, is the GCC Linux compiler provided with an IDE? My friend tells me he has
>>>>found only the command line compiler.
>>>
>>>Hah. Dream on.
>>>
>>>The closest thing you'll find to an IDE is Emacs. I've seen people edit their
>>>code, compile it, run it, debug it, etc. all in Emacs, but I don't know how it's
>>>all done. I just use it for editing (it does have colour syntax highlighting),
>>>and I do the other stuff in xterms.
>>
>>I did not know Emacs could debug too...
>>
>>Anyway, thanks for the info!
>
>Actually, there are at least two IDEs available for GCC running in Linux.
>One of them is pretty much identical to the RHIDE IDE for djgpp (the Linux
>version has a different name, which I do not remember) and a new IDE (still
>alpha or beta software, I think) called kdevelop. None of these programs
>are used much, because almost everybody finds Emacs vastly superior.
>Mastering Emacs takes some time, but when you have mastered it you will
>probably feel crippled in all other IDEs (including the IDEs supplied with
>commercial compilers like Visual C). The default settings in Emacs are
>not very good, but you can easily configure and extend the editor to your
>own preferences.
>
>Tord
Well guys... Actually I have done it. Yesterday my Windows crashed once again
(now I'm not able to set the display properties anymore). I felt so frustrated
that I really wanted to hammer my computer. I refrained and decided (just to
calm down) to install Linux on a computer I had already prepared for this (by
letting an unformatted 800Mb partition on it).
It took me 20 minutes to set up Linux, and I had no documentation except the
small readme from the Mandrake 6.0 CD.
It's not perfect though. Initially the display resolution was 640x480 (which is
fine) but the desktop size was 800x600. So I had to move the mouse around to see
everything. Very annoying and stupid problem. I took me more than one hour to
get rid of this.
There are other problems, like a really snowy screen when things are drawn (the
S3 driver apparently has problems), and I have no sound.
But well, it works. Maybe Linux is not so far from being as easy to install and
use as Windows. I don't find it to run any faster (as some told me), but it's
not slow.
About emacs and other horrible things I have seen: these tools are prehistoric.
It does not matter how powerful they are. They are cryptic and ugly, and as more
and more Windows users will come to Linux, it will be very important to provide
easier (even if less powerful) tools. I'm the one to still use DOS utilities, so
I understand perfectly that one can love emacs, but still some effort has to be
done for people that are no Unix experts.
I suppose it's just a matter of time, and anyway simpler and user friendly texte
editors are provided with KDE. If you come from Windows, KDE looks really like
Windows and you get used to it very quickly.
Sofar my opinion is that Linux looks indeed technically more powerful than
Windows, but there is still some work to make it more user friendly.
It is possible to have both Windows and Linux on the same disk, but you must
have separated partitions for each (which is not very complicated to do). Then
you can boot the one you want, and even choose the one that is launched by
default when you type nothing at boot time.
Linux will read your DOS/Windows floppies and recognize your CD-ROM drive.
All of this is just my opinion, or worse, just my first impressions. But I don't
expect people to try Linux more than 2 hours if it is too difficult, so first
impressions matter. And my first impressions are not too bad.
Now I feel much more relaxed to know that I will probably be able to drop
Windows at any time and use Linux as my developpment environment. So I return to
Windows now and to the Windows version of Chess Tiger. :)
I might try to compile Chess Tiger for Linux whenever I have a free weekend. I
don't expect this to happen before the next millenium though...
Christophe
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