1) Which of the two, Fedora or RH9, would be the best, most stable thing to run? Which one has the best C++ IDE? (don't tell me I should use vi, I'll kill myself before I use that pile of shit again)

2) Which one can I safely install and later uninstall (read: keeping XP/HD boot stuff in tact so I don't fuck up XP) as well as dual boot with XP Pro and read/write from an NTFS partition?

Keep in mind I have only 14.7 GB of space left (its a laptop). If I had the time I'd just go home and get my dual AMD machine which has like 80 GB free, but that too has XP Pro, so the questions here are relevant no matter what I do.

If you guys could help me out, I'd really appreciate it. I know there are some Linux guys in here that know their stuff.

[ 09-23-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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seriously, though, either will surely satisfy 2), but 1) I have no comments on. I don't touch Red Hat products. Fedora is newer anyway, and I'm not sure Red Hat 9 can be downloaded anymore. I don't do C++, but I guess Eclipse supports that.

Of course, while installing Linux is quick and painless if you have a good network connection, if the only purpose is to test compiling a program, you could just as well install Cygwin and stick to your MicroShit software. Cygwin is a set of Linux tools and libraries for Windows.

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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Why even bother with a dual boot. You'd be better off pulling an old HD out of storage and using that for the Linux install.

As for which distro, I have no opinion. Me=linux noob.

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

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(read: keeping XP/HD boot stuff in tact so I don't fuck up XP)

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[1] http://crux.nu

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On a side note, when I want my preferences critiqued, I'll ask you guys. You sure are a testy, defensive bunch.

RB - I develop Windows-only stuff. I have no concern or interest to make any of my software, current or future, cross-platform. Just because you have too much time on your hands that you can report Mozilla bugs when it crashes the entire OS doesn't mean you should stick by your OS of choice blindly. All you had to say was "I disagree, Flux. I think Linux is just swell" and I wouldn't have said any of this. To each his own, except when they don't agree with you, huh? Then you gotta call 'em an ignorant newb. Way to represent.

[ 09-24-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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Originally posted by Flux:
Just because you have too much time on your hands that you can report Mozilla bugs when it crashes the entire OS doesn't mean you should stick by your OS of choice blindly.

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This is EXACTLY the kind of comment that provokes the ignorant noob comments. Mozilla CANNOT crash the OS, it is not integrated in any place like M$ shit, and btw does not crash like ever. As a matter of fact, just about the ONLY way to crash Linux is bad hardware or experimental driver modules. Heck, you don't even have to reboot after major upgrades/installations.

Disclaimer: my positive Linux experience is all based on Debian. If you use(d) Red Hat for some off reason, I can only say it's your own damn fault. I installed Red Hat once, saw it crash and complain at every second thing I did, before I gave up on it.

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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As for it being my own fault, it wasn't. I wasn't allowed to change one config property on that machine. That was up to the sysadmin. I was just an intern and I professed no l33tn3ss with Linux to them.

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I'll cut you some slack since you're still in school. You'll see the light when you get out and get a job in the industry.

At any rate, I first answered your question (you're welcome), and then stated "If I didn't know you from here, xyz would apply." Keyword being "if."

~> uptime
19:57:09 up 135 days, 10:29, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

That's from our production (CRUX) server, which hosts http://windmillcycles.com and runs both our Internet and intranet web applications. While the average load is 0, I assure you the box is far from idle - it's just that fast. I'd love to see a Windows web server make it that long serving even _static_ content - without crashing or getting owned.

Relax. You'll be alright.

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I managed to completely wreck X on a debian install I did once, and seeing as I didn't edit a single config file, to this day, I don't know how I did it. It never ran right after that, not even in console.

I came to the conclusion shortly after this that I'm hard on operating systems. Mostly because shortly after giving X a heart attack, I managed to make the WinXP kernel take a dump on another machine. And that's not easy. Win2k/XP is fairly solid (it is, just not as solid as linux)

LOL

[ 09-24-2004: Message edited by: AcidWarp ]

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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Originally posted by RoGuEBiTcH:
Any self proclaimed software developer who doesn't have a preference of Linux distribution/IDE also does not have a clue. It's nothing personal.

I'll cut you some slack since you're still in school. You'll see the light when you get out and get a job in the industry.

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I guess I forgot to mention I already have a job developing web-based applications in ASP.NET and C# at Kent State University, using MS SQL Server 2000 for any database-driven applications. The stuff we make is used by students, faculty and staff that, at specific times in the semester, get hundreds, maybe a thousand hits a day and our servers and applications seem to hold up just fine. Our student internet connection registration utility is used by the 90% of the 6,500 students living on campus that have a computer, and see quite a bit of activity when everyone moves in the weekend before classes start.

But I appreciate the slack. Thanks.

[ 09-27-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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Re: lead programmer with no formal computer science education.. yikes..

It's pure fact that the most prestigious computer science schools in the world (MIT, Berkeley, WPI, University of Washington, Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon) teach their students *ix. ALL of these schools themselves directly contribute to various open source Unix variants. IBM, Sun, Novell, MySQL AB, Red Hat, Oracle, and BEA Systems concur that Linux is the most desirable platform for enterprise development and deployment available today.

Will you always be able to find work as a point-and-click MS drone? Probably. Will you ever be innovating? Absolutely not.

Get with the program.

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[ 09-27-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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Re: lead programmer with no formal computer science education.. yikes..

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you don't know me dude. please don't insult me. what are you trying to say? you have to go through four years of expensive force-fed knowledge in order to be an innovative programmer? How about 16 years of individual learning where i choose my path and follow it, rather than have someone dictate it to me? Einstein was a great innovater with no formal training.

i dont consider it too innovating finding work in the industry. you're just contributing to someone else's idea.

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One thing about it though...a friend set it up for me...lol. Eventually I got a driver for my TNT2 for it so it could actually do OpenGL in hardware mode. I just couldn't do enough with it, so I went to WindowsXP after a few months of it being idle.

All in all, Debian was good, just not for me.

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Ohhhh dear. Better tell John Carmack that RB.

That is the inherent problem with University Students...and grads (read: self-absorbed assholes in their unrealistic Victorian setting getting a convoluted perception of reality with a little dose of intellect and then masking the whole lot of bullshit with a little "enlightenment")

My uncle paraphrased it once very well when describing University and why his juvenile dilinquint son must go: "University is not about an education, it is about a lifestyle". Well, based on some people I know who have gone to university and watched them change, I am glad I never went.

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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Plus like you can't even hold a flashlight and shoot at same time in the latest one.

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-Programming ignorant random insurance agent.

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Originally posted by FS:
...and the result of that is that games are buggy, crash a lot, screw up the system, get a gazillion patches, etc etc.

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as well as a ferrari, two hit game series and multi-million dollar generating technology.

sure seems to be doing a lot better than the creators of KDiamonds, the largest, deepest game made by and for only Linux users.

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and not only is your post not connected to what I said, it's not even internally consistent! Did you seriously EXPECT the creator of a free game to get rich? That guy was obviously not after money.

So there

[ 10-02-2004: Message edited by: FS ]

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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Originally posted by FS:
hey, was I talking about monetary success? That has NOTHING to do with code quality...

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Ah, you're right. Nobody had been paying him to use his engines because I'm sure the APIs are so poorly written. I mean, I'm surprised anybody uses his engine, especially since everyone complains about how poorly designed it is. Forget about freelance modding; nobody wants to frustrate themselves with such an unnecessarily complex, low-quality software package. No, money has nothing to do with code quality at all. How silly of me.

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Speaking purely from a software production standpoint, it doesn't make ANY sense for a small game studio to write their own engine, if the market leader engine is available for licensing at a reasonable cost. That, again, has no relation to the quality of the market leader, as long as it fits the requirements of the project.

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Originally posted by FS:
Wow, I can't believe I'm agreeing with FS on this one

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There are always a few exceptions to every rule. Carmack was one of them, and also has an IQ in the ballpark of 150 I'd imagine.

Flux ~ I doubt you understand very much about software design. It's unfortunate for you that you're persuing it as a career.

Quake crashes?? Must be Windows related..

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If there exceptions then why generalize? I am sure there are tons and tons more people in the same boat as Carmack.

What is the extent of your knowledge of software design anyway? Where do you work?

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Originally posted by RoGuEBiTcH:
Flux ~ I doubt you understand very much about software design. It's unfortunate for you that you're persuing it as a career.

Quake crashes?? Must be Windows related..

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It's unfortunate you're so narrow-minded and judgemental. You must be one of those elitest geeks that think they know everything and that everyone else is wrong. Every normal person in my major avoids assholes like you. I doubt very much you know how to interact with people, since these elitest geeks tend to compensate for their lack of people skills with blurting out incorrect facts and just bragging about how much they "know." This thread only demonstrates my point.

You bash everyone's level of experience here without even mentioning what you do. I'll bet you haven't been out of college very long either, or you're just acting like it. A year as some bitch monkey coder in a cubicle at some no-name business software company in Podunk, Massachusetts and you think you've seen it all, huh?

Keep in mind I have a real job, with real deadlines, making real software that real people use. College or not, I've been under the gun from bosses demanding features be added and bugs be removed. You can stop being a prick now.

PS I've never had Quake crash on me when I ran it, and that was in Win98.

[ 10-05-2004: Message edited by: Flux ]

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I've been out of school for a few years. During my last two years in college, and for 6 months after graduating, I was a software engineer at International Compliance Systems, Inc - a software firm in Fall River, MA. I left because of personal differences with the president of the company, and now work at Windmill Cycles, Inc. in North Dartmouth. It's actually a motorcycle dealership. However, the owner hired me to develop a new generation of dealership software. As open standards and web services are my expertise, it's worked out to be a pretty good match. Ultimately we'll be forking a new company from the dealership within the next 12 months to deploy and support the software at other dealerships. The software itself will be released under an open source license.

I have a bachelors in Computer & Information Science from UMass Dartmouth. My GPA was well above 3.0, and above 3.5 in CS. I took graduate level courses as an undergrad, and audited other CS electives that I could not take because the classes were full.

Junior year I led a project group in my databases class to win a semester-long contest, granting us automatic A+'s for the course. Senior year I was selected to be the project manager for another semester long group project in the final CS course undergraduates must take. My group was the only one to produce a working product, and it is still in use at the university today.

Currently I develop a J2EE application comprised of ~40KLOC Java, 15KLOC XHTML templates. It's a distributed, web based system that sits atop a MySQL database. I've written the actual application server (using embedded Jetty), a JDBC connection pooler, a thread-safe distributed concurrency mechanism using XML-RPC, and an XHTML template parser that supports logical evaluations, mathematical expressions, etc using a syntax I created. That's the backend.

I'm also a CLC Maintainer - I develop and maintain parts of CRUX Linux. My latest for-fun project is a binary package management system called Pkgsync that allows a sysadmin to synchronize software installations over any number of CRUX Linux PCs.

Before that, I wrote a console driven BPM (beats per minute) counter that analyzes audio files using phase shifting and approximates the tempo. It supports mp3, ogg, wav, and raw audio samples, and can even be piped to from other applications.

Aside from being a geek, I'm also a semi-professional DJ. Interacting with club managers, event planners, and most importantly club goers/partiers.. not things the socially inept could handle.

Uhm..yea.

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I think it's called Megalomania, or, The everyone-is-entitled-to-my-opinions syndrome.

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“I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

My girlfriend and I. Can this be dropped now? Is it so difficult to accept that someone else has their shit together and might know more than you about being a geek? Jesus Christ, I have no problem admitting it when that's the case. This is my last post to this thread. If anyone has angst issues, I'd say it's you, Snag, with your personal attacks. IT credentials *were* the subject of this thread.

[ 10-06-2004: Message edited by: RoGuEBiTcH ]

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I like Flux!

I like FS!

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Is it so difficult to accept that someone else has their shit together and might know more than you about being a geek?

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I don't deny that you have your shit together but so do I and lots of other people.

No one is a better geek than anyone else. It's like apples and oranges. You may be better at Java but I might own your ass at C++.

btw you started with the personal attacks, J.

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Re: lead programmer with no formal computer science education.. yikes..

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Snag ~ What's that in USD? If you had real schools in Canada, I might value your opinion.

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Flux ~ I doubt you understand very much about software design. It's unfortunate for you that you're persuing it as a career.

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