Any other Linux users on THN?

Irn-Bru · Post by **Irn-Bru** » Thu Jun 26, 2008 6:50 pm

Just out of curiosity--is there anyone else out there?

If so, how long have you used it? What distribution do you prefer? Any favorite programs / tools?

JansenFan · Post by **JansenFan** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 12:53 am

I have been porting the application I code from SCO Openserver to RedHat 7 since the beginning of the year. I didn't know much of anything about Linux when I started, so I've been learning a lot about the way it and by proxy, the GNU Compiler, differ from the SCO C compiler. I've also found that there has been a lot of lazy coding done by myself and others that works fine on SCO that causes fatal errors in RedHat.

For the programs and tools, in this initial port, I'm taking a character/curses-based SCO application and migrating it to a character/curses-based RedHat product. I'm not getting to play with a whole lot. In my next release, I want to start using the GUI side of Linux to display menus and forms rather than curses. RedHat hats curses.

Cappster · Post by **Cappster** » Fri Jun 27, 2008 7:55 am

I've tried Ubuntu from the install cd, but haven't fully installed the OS. Once I get my hands on a KVM switch, I am going to install it on a spare computer that I have. I may even install ubuntu server on said workstation and use my current workstation for the client install (dual boot of course).

welch · Post by **welch** » Sun Jun 29, 2008 1:05 pm

I have used Red Hat and SuSe since 1997. This is written on a Vista laptop, because Windows is so much easier to find...especially with laptops.

- in '97, my "tech center" at GE used Red Hat to get hands-on for "big UNIX". Rd Hat 5.? ran fine on my 200 mhz Pentium with 64mb ram. It was too slow on my old 33mhz P4, vintage 1993, spare home machine.

- in 2000, we used Red Hat ? (too many versions to remember) as a test server, as we had noticed that at least one broker-dealer (one of the biggest three) had begun to develop all their trading desk systems in Red Hat. Those are "mission critical". We also wanted to see if we could use Open Office, rather than MS Office...just for curiosity and for the principle of brealing the Microsoft monopoly.

- by 2003 and '04, members of my team would take HPUX source code home and develop modules on Red Hat.

- Today, it is still easier to use Vista when you buy a pre-built machine because peripheral-makers write all drivers for Vista -- that's the market. Laptops have such specialized peripherals that it is often hard to get them to run Linux.

- I have a friend who uses Red Hat's "Fedora" as his main OS.

My conclusion? (a) Linux is great, and (b) geting better, and (c) Vista is a giant load of resource-eating features you don;t care about, but the computer world follows MS, and (c) Linux / BSD Unix have nice graphical interfaces that can be just as resource-hogging. GUI eats machines. I'm not thrilled about Java, either, but that's another question ("Java is not much worse than C++").

On principle, I hope Linux and BSD both grow and even thrive. The Industry was more fun when there was variety.

Irn-Bru · Post by **Irn-Bru** » Mon Jun 30, 2008 2:31 pm

I'm partial to the Gnome desktop environment and after bouncing around a few different distributions really settled on Ubuntu. I find it sleek enough that my machine (which was pretty powerful when I put it together in 2002) runs very well.

I resurrected an older laptop using Damn-Small Linux and Puppy Linux, and I'm currently setting up a laptop that my grandmother is going to use.

For anyone that's computer savvy but has never tried Linux, I highly recommend at least researching it. Welch is right that it feels really good to break away. . .

doroshjt · Post by **doroshjt** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 7:36 pm

Finally got my laptop dual booting vista 64 and open suse 11 64. Took me along time to get my wifi card working in opensuse. Then after all the effort I only use two programs just like my vista partition. Firefox and Thunderbird. Haha, someday i'll install eclipse and start coding some stuff, but in the mean time, I do enough .net coding on my desktop to fill my time for work. But that partition is there for the use if I ever get around to it.

JansenFan · Post by **JansenFan** » Mon Jul 14, 2008 9:14 am

I discovered -- well, technically, someone told me about it, but I digress -- valgrind, which is an application you install and then run your executable through. It identifies memory leaks and other coding issues that you may otherwise miss until you've got a customer losing, as they say, 900 ba-jillion dollars per nano-second."

I've only just scratched the surface with this application, using the memory leak tool to battle a few tricky segmentation faults.