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NOOB to Linux programming

th3rmite

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Messages
378
So I'm planning on switching my entire family over to Linux, about four computers.

Anyways, I love programming in my spare time with Visual Studio on Windows. I tend to like making my own quick little solutions to problems. I am quite adept at using VB.net and php. My main concern is to what languages(s) I should look at if I plan on writing home software under Linux. I am moving my family's computers to Kubuntu (my 5 year old daughter has an easier time using KDE than Gnome for soem reason), so if I do any gui programming it will be under KDE.

What resources, from experience, could anyone suggest I look at? Like I said I am mainly used to VS.NET and PHP so I'm not sure what kind of set up I would need or even what language would be most useful to know.

Thanks
 
qt is what KDE is written in ( afaik ), so that'd be my choice. It's cross platform in it's nature, which is a huge plus.

It's a full on GUI toolkit, so it's got it's quirks.
 
Python :)

Have you ever played with a modded xbox? All those custom scripts to watch youtube movies, play simple games (tetris, snake), check the weather? They were all written in Python.

Ruby is nice too... syntactically a lot cleaner. But Python has been around longer and there are way more libraries available. You can write nice cross-platform GUIs with wxpython as well. And there's a really nice Python IDE (not quite as nice as Visual Studio, but still nice): Stani's Python Editor (SPE).

And, yes: KDE is written in qt. Someone recently told me you can get free developers tools for qt now? It used to cost quite a bit to even license the compiler... that's why 95% of all linux GUI development has been done in Gnome! Here's a great (short) article from 2000 that sums it up: http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-05-001-21-OP-LF-KE

The design of KDE was based on a fundamental mistake: use of the Qt library, which at the time was non-free software. Despite the good intentions of the KDE developers, and despite the fact that the code of KDE itself was free software, KDE could never be part of a completely free operating system as long as it needed a non-free program to function.


It's a shame too... qt is so powerful... but what's happened has happened...
 
Is kdevelop any good? From a quick look at the kdevelop website it seems as though the IDE is seperate from the programming language. Not to sound stupid, but is that true and is that typical of Linux programming?
 
Is kdevelop any good? From a quick look at the kdevelop website it seems as though the IDE is seperate from the programming language. Not to sound stupid, but is that true and is that typical of Linux programming?

What do you mean "separate from the programming language"
it is an IDE created in C++ using the QT toolkit. You can use it to program C++ and use QT or you can use to to code other languages

python is a very handy thing to know if you really want to get into linux-coding quickly.
 
in regard to perl/python/ruby, it's a matter of preference, but you'll want to learn one of them, and learn it well. it'll prove insanely useful for system administration
 
Is kdevelop any good? From a quick look at the kdevelop website it seems as though the IDE is seperate from the programming language. Not to sound stupid, but is that true and is that typical of Linux programming?


The two dominant development tools are still vim & emacs, which are (GASP!) text-based text-editors. However, they're both fully scriptable & extensible and don't require you to move your hands off the home row to use the arrow key to move around a document.

Heck, in a certain way of looking at things, Unix itself is simply a development environment, there's some pretty impressive stuff done with just bash, awk & sed. Windows feels more like an 'application deployment' environment.
 
I find the idea of moving your families computer sover to linux interesting, but to each his own.

Kdevelop is an awsome IDE, and it is capable of writing for many languages and integrating subversion/CVS for revision control if you want it.

Now I myself am a gnome fan, but I still use kdevelop (mainly to help a friend) othwise its just vim :)

If you are used to visual studio kdevelope should not be too hard for you, and it will make using the GNU debugger a lot easier on you. gdb is a bit tough to get used to when coming from windows.
 
Yes, KDevelop is a great, i would also recommend Eclipse.

I would say that C is the best language for linux programming, but i do most of my coding in C++
 
I thank you all for the helpful tips. I have actually just downloaded kdevelop and am in the process of playing/learning with it. I am also going to look into Ruby when I get a chance this weekend. Once again thanks.
 
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