Friday, October 27, 2006

Joy of Tech - Linux Lovers

When i bought my present PC for home, it came with Turbo Linux distribution. The PC is a Compaq make with AMD XP 2400+ processor. It was 2004 July when i bought it. I first decided to keep the Turbo Linux distribution. Later i experimented with a few more distributions (Fedora Core 2, SuSE 10.x, RH 9). It was a good setup and i was gradually getting used to the habit of doing common things from command line (like playing music using mplayer). It was a dream like phase for me as i saw the developer tools which came free (vi, xemacs, and GNU GCC toolchain, linux kernel sources) and felt very passionate about someday becoming a linux systems programmer geek :). Those days i used to be learning unix systems programming, linux kernel development and fundamentals of embedded systems programming - all of it in self-taught way. I read some books then like - Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment (almost completed it) by R Stevens, An Embedded Software Primer by David E Simons and some books i started but did not complete like Fundamentals of Embedded Software Development (read only first few chapters) by D Lewis and Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with DOS and Linux (only read half of it) by Duntemann. That phase did not last very long with me (wanned in about six months) as i found that i could teach myself to program in assembly using the nasm assembler for x86 even on Windows using the DJGPP port of GCC plus i was more used to Windows as a user, and whatever the Geeks of the world have to say, Windows appeared to be more stabler an option when running RAD tools (IDEs) and other daily use applications (browsers like firefox and opera, email clients, chat applications etc). I lost my patience with Linux desktop at home and bought and installed WinXP Home edition.

Now, i feel i need a Linux system (systems programming, driver development) preferrably Kubuntu distribution, together with a Windows system (for email, chat, java dev etc). At work for the last one year i have not used any unix so i miss my Linux setup at home sometimes. Upgrading my present system with another hard disk where i can install linux is one possibility or will get another system (this time a laptop when i have the dough :) and install both win and linux in dual boot partitions. Ubuntu linux is good choice (as its all fats removed distribution of linux) with only the essential software (no more 3 word processors, 4 media players, 3 browsers etc as is still common with many other linux distros). Read more on the latest Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft release.

No comments:

Popular micro services patterns

Here are some popular Microservice design patterns that a programmer should know: Service Registry  pattern provides a  central location  fo...