Hi everybody !
At the ceBit I saw this Corel distribution running a FireGL under Linux. Impressive. I'm interesting in doing C++ and GL coding under Linux, but I'm not experienced at it.
QUESTIONS !!!
What distribiution would be suited for a GL coder ?
What compiler/IDE/Editor is good ?
What books ? Where to start ?
Thanks
What are you crazy???
C++? Ok, I can forgive you for the C++ part.
I myself was looking for a good way to develope for linux (C or C++), so I ran into a few things...
I don't think distribution is that big a deal, I use RedHat, but I am sure Debian SUSE Mandrake VA, etc etc should work fine but I can only safely say Redhat for now...
For GUI programming I prefer GTK+ as a GUI toolkit because its C based and you can see how everything really works instead of guessing what C++ does with objects or using a preprocessor to get rid of the problems associated with C++, you can find more information about it here www.gtk.org and www.gnome.org, there is a gtk+ widget called gtkglarea which allows you to create a gl view in your application, under this platform most people use Make files, but there is a program called gIDE which is also used by many as an IDE. For Visual Programming AKA GUI building tools there is glade so you should check that out as a way to quickly build interfaces and save coding time.
For game programmer/multimedia kind of developement there is the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Library), the release version 1.0 does not support OpenGL but the CVS version 1.1 does and can be downloaded, compiled and used but it may be buggy. The SDL is actually very portable, and you can develope under diffrent platforms and if you don't do anything platform specific, you can recompile from on diffrent platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, BeOS). I don't recall the exact link to this site but search the developement part to www.lokigames.com and look in their smpeg section and it should have a link to SDL... BTW this SDK also includes cross platform audio as well.
As for books I am not so sure about that, all I can say is to go to gtks home page and look at their tutorials and compile their tutorial example programs, from there you should look for gtkglarea and if you do not have a supported hardware accelerator get Mesa from www.mesa3d.org so that you can have a library to compile against, mesa also mentions about hardware accelerators. Anyway that is how I got started.
Hello
Well, all you need to develop OpenGL stuff under Linux is: a OpenGL-supported X-server, a OpenGL-compatible library (Mesa3D is great) , a texteditor and a compiler (gcc works fine), then you are ready to go with the OpenGL part. No specific distribution needed.
Bob
hmmm...
I want a desktop linux, so corel looks interesting. But I guess I have to wait. Can't image to work with an OS that doesn't support my USB mouse and my USB CD writer....
I'm not sure how far along they are but USB support is coming along, maybe by the next large release it will be supported better but this is probably the site to keep an eye on it...
http://www.linux-usb.org/
If you have the time and if they support your hardware you could probably learn how to compile the kernal, I'd do it but my time is limited
Umm, anyway don't forget that you can develope using OpenGL today under windows using GTK+ win32 port or SDL (for game developement), to be able to port the code to linux tomarrow
Check out the GTK+ web site I listed above and look for the link to the win32 port. I like using GTK+ more then MFC (actually I lost interesting in C++ after this). I used to be a real C++ advocate, but after seeing how fragmented it has become as a standard, I have dropped it, and as I progress in my own thoughts of a language, I have decided that C++ is not going the direction I want it to, you can read about some of these things on my web site although I have not finished the article about C++ yet...
http://members.aol.com/suboner
Anyway good luck to you...
Ok, thank you)
Can't wait to start Linux developement. I hope that hardware vendors will take Linux more serious in the future. The biggest problem for me is that Linux is intended as a server OS. For a server os you don't need USB and you don't need GL. I can't imagine that hardware vendors will treat Linux more serious before it has established itself as desktop platform.
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