jfsgr8

The futue of Linux is quite rosey, thank you very much. It's already established itself on the server side, eating Sun's lunch and being a multi-billion dollar industry. And it's catching on in the desktop arena. Many governments are migrating, as are enterprises. Home use is going up, as Linux has leap-frogged past Mac for the number two spot. Also consider the fact that a lot of Linux desktop usage is "underground", and not able to be accounted for due to people sharing copies, doing downloads and installing with or over the existing OS on their PC.

Try using RPMDrake. It will list the available packages from your installation CDs. gcc should be there. Check it and install it. It will install it in a snap.

I believe that Ubuntu is the only distro currently offering Gnome 2.8. You can't even get Gnome 2.8 from the Debian Sid repositories yet. Fedora Core 3, to be released in another month or two, will offer Gnome 2.8 as well. But FC is actually a permanent beta (to support RHEL), and is as buggy as any beta can be expected to be (just follow many of the reported issues, as well as their user forums). The forthcoming SuSE 9.2 will be offering Gnome 2.6 (same as Mandrake 10.1). So the lesson here is that Mandrake should not be criticized for not including Gnome 2.8 in the new 10.1 release. Only the completely Gnome-centric Ubuntu features Gnome 2.8 at this time. They even have core Gnome and Debian developers as part of their team. And they will maintain a 6 month release cycle, and each release will always feature the very latest Gnome release. This is their specialty. So if you always have to have the latest and greatest of Gnome, go with Ubuntu. But for me, Mandrakelinux strikes the perfect balance between being cutting edge, and maintaining relative bug free stability. After all they were the first distro to fully feature kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.2 in a stable release. And I prefer KDE most of the time, and Mandrakelinux is usually on top of the latest and greatest in KDE. The only reason KDE 3.3 is not the default for Mandrake 10.1 is that KDE 3.3 is not stable yet. But it's still offered as an install option. That's both wise and fair, wouldn't you agree?

KDevelop is good. However, I like using Kate, which is an editor geared towards programmers. It offeres syntax highlighting, a file and class structure view, and a built in console from which you can compile your apps with Make, gcc, or g++. It's a really nice tool, and it's lightweight and simple to use.

"The C Programming Language" by Kernigan and Ritchie (Dennis Ritchie being the Creator of C) and "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup (the creator of C++) are both outstanding books for any C or C++ programmer, and "must haves". However, neither are great for newbies. For that, any number of C/C++ online tutorials are good. For a book that is a great C++ introduction I recommend "Accelerated C++" by Konig and Moo. This book is outstanding, and teaches crucial and useful higher level concepts (like the STL) right off the bat.

Some recomendations: 1) Instead of using C style arrays to contain your user and password, why not use the STL string class? It's so much easier. It will also make you a better C++ programmer. Most C++ "gurus", not the least of which is Bjarne Stroustrup (the creator of C++), emphatically tell people to try to use C++ with the STL, and fully utilize C++'s powerful libraries, rather than using C++ "as a better C", writing C style code. In other words, make coding easier on yourself, and only use lower level C stuff (char arrays, pointers to char, bit operators, etc) if you absolutely have to. Go for the higher level construcst that the STL provides. Use the string class in your program. 2) The program terminates immediately because nothing happens after entering the user and passord. You have the (proper) 'return 0;' at the end of the main event. So that's it for the program. If you want it to continue, perhaps you could put the user and password entry into a loop, and it only exits the loop until the user enters 'end' or 'q', or something like that. This would provide some continuity to the program. 3) In the 'if' statement, include both uppercase and lower case y, using the || (logical 'OR' opporator, just to make it irrelevant whether or not the user enters upper or lower case.

BTW - I've considered joining the Mandrake club, but I was a part of it for a month as part of my Mandrakelinux PowerPack purchase. Mandrake club was not that exciting for me, so I decided to bypass getting a year substription of it. I think Mandrake club is a great idea, though. I like the community spirit it brings. It's sort of like contributing to your local PBS station, even though you don't need to, because you are helping maintain the value it brings. However, I would like to see Mandrake offer more things of actual value in Mandrake club, other than early downloads of things that will become available for free later on. Until then, I will continue to support my favorite Linux disto (Mandrakelinux) by purchasing the PowerPack for major releases (perhaps my next purchase will be 11.0), and also perhaps purchasing some Mandrakesoft goodies, like T shirts, coffee mugs, city bag, etc. And the next time I need a new PC, it will be from MandrakeStore (hopefully, they'll have PCs available for purchase outside France and Benelux, and in North America in particular).

My own company's software, called RFGen, has a very large portion of it's source code (nearly 2 million lines of code) written in Visual Basic. Here it is: http://www.rfgen.com If you visit this site, click on the "RFGen Users" tab. This lists many of our major customers. RFGen is deployed in 50% of fortune 100 companies, including deployments that have up to 170 users per server, handling thousands of transactions per day, interacting with enterprise class databases, ERP (SAP and PeopleSoft), and screen mapping hosts (vt220 to Unix/Linux, tn3270 to IBM mainframes, and tn5250 to AS400). In short, this is living proof that Visual Basic can most certainly be used to produce first rate, proven, enterprise class software. RFGen was originally written entirely in Visual Basic, but has recently been in the process of being converted to C++, because we do not want to use .Net (for various reasons). I'm also trying to lobby the main developer to choose QT, GTK+, or wxWidgets for the future interface (which still needs to be converted from VB), to acheive cross platform capabilities. RFGen already connects to other platforms, but only runs on Windows. I would love it if we could install it on Mandrakelinux! ;-) All that said, since VB is so easy, it does enable bad programmers to produce bad code. But the same can be said with many other languages, not the least of which is Perl, which has the reputation for producing indecipherable code, even for those who originally produced it (and I'm not knocking Perl, because I think it's a great language). So, a Visual Basic -like language/IDE for the Linux platform can only be a wonderful thing. Let's let novice programmers, non-programmers, general systems admins and other IT personell be productive in Linux. :-)

The Hurd Kernel has been in development, in one form or another, since the late 80's, and 15-16 years later, it is still not usable (other than for curious hackers). The Linux Kernel, as wonderful, fast, stable and flexible as it is, effectively made the Hurd kernel irrelevant (since it combined nicely with the GNU user land utilities). Only Richard Stallman and a small collection of FSF hackers seem to care about the Hurd kernel, mostly on a theoretical basis ("micro kernels are better than monolithic kernels", blah blah, blah). Open source thrives on merit, not on theory. The proof is always in the pudding. For the past several years, the Linux kernel has been proving itself, in a big way. If the Hurd hackers ever want anyone to use their kernel, they had better make it work, and show the world some advantages to using it. Oherwise, it is doomed to purgatorial irrelevance, and should be ignored by all but the most pain addicted individuals. And no, I've never used it. If they ever get it to a usable state (where they say so on their own website), I might give it a try out of curiousity.

I've now been a Linux fan and heavy user for about 2 years. I'm also a programmer / analyst by trade. I'm well versed in C/C++, Java, the various Web development tools, and yes, Visual Basic. So I could not disagree with you more on VB. While VB is not the best tool for hardcore systems development or over the counter software, VB is probably the best rapid application development tool, ever, in all platforms and environments. VB is one of the few things MS has done right, from a technological perspective, as well as a business perspective. There will always be a need for good RAD tools, that are accessable for general IT personell, in order to make quick and dirty applications. Businesses need this. So, from that standpoint, Visual Basic is one of the best things to happen to programming. It brought productive programming to non programming specialists, who needed to get the job done. Personally, I now prefer C and C++, as well as various scripting languages (Perl, Python), as well as application server languages (JSP, PHP, ASP). But for what Visual Basic was designed for, nothing is better. Sadly, with the Unix/C snobbery that is so prevailant in the Linux/OSS world, there has been nothing coming close to VB's RAD abilities for the Linux environment. Linux enthusiasts, as well as those basing their businesses on Linux, need to get over the anti VB snobbery/mentality. Basic, VB, and VBA are very popular because they are easy and they work and they enable less skilled programmers or general systems admins get their jobs done. The Linux world needs to get a clue. There is a big opportunity for Linux here. VB6 is going to be reaching it's end of life, and VB.Net is essentially a completely new language that is more similar to Java than VB6. This has totally pissed off the nearly 3.5 million VB6 developers out there. MS should have limited their Java clone to C#, then let VB be VB (perhaps add VB7). Now Linux, with QBasic (and the QT designer tool is awesome so I suspect that QBasic will be awesome as well), has the great potential to lure some of those disillusioned VB6 developers. In short, QBasic sounds wonderful. It has the great potential to lure more people to the Linux platform.

That sounds a bit selfish to me. When you join Mandrakeclub you are contributing to the open source software development, helping Mandrakesoft to survive and continue with Mandrakelinux development and so on. How was it? : Dont ask what the open source software can do for you, but what can you do for it. You can join the club for 60 euros/dollars a year, that is 5 $/€ a month !!! Is it really that much ??... Or you can pay 120 $/€ and be able to download all de Powerpacks Mandrake releases within that year, 10€/$ a month doesnt seem that expensive to me... Im not saying that you should join, but i just dont like the way you put it, i dont think its fear, where is the sense of community if you are only looking for your own personal benefit (ie.: I'm interested in joining only if these commercial programs will be useful to me)? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Personally, I contributed to Mandrake (and the promotion of Linux in general), by puchasing the $80 Mandrake 10 Official Power Pack, when I did not really need to - I had already purchased the 9$ 4 CDs of Mandrake community from one of the online Linux CD vendors. With this purchase, got some extra goodies (extra software, printed manuals), but I still did not need to fork out $80. But it was worth it, and Mandrake deserves it.