Linux distro for programming

[Dat Guy]

5 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

All the computer labs are Mac (...) the professors said Linux is fine since the commands for what we are doing is the same.

Sorry, but your professors are wrong. Mac OS (or whatever they call it this year) largely uses the FreeBSD userland (plus the GNU bash shell) which is quite different from Linux's GNU userland. A notable example of applications which show a completely different behavior on FreeBSD and GNU (Linux et al.) is sed, you might want to compare man sed on both systems.

 

If it's just about using Haskell or C++, you would be fine with Windows as well; but system programming is something different.

And it's almost safe to assume that GNU shell scripts won't work on Mac OS out of the box - FreeBSD shell scripts, however, will.

 

Choose wisely.

[uzarnom]

23 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

 

Even if in Linux, I would be able to access the internet and look things up if(as) needed. The last time I tried a virtual environment, I used Virtual Box and had issues with my resolutions being a jacked up. I never found a way around it. It was rather annoying.

if the issue was having a really shit small resolution that you could not change, install the guests additions cd thing
Up in the top menu there should be a insert guest additions, let that run and you should be able to resize to what ever you want

I would advise using a virtual box unless you need the speed,

My last semester needed a unix environment i dual booted (had a dual core laptop 6GB ram), and for running was great. i installed ubuntu and it handled the dual booting setup (with grub)

but when i wanted to remove it to give more space to my windows install i broke it D:

also if you dual boot and don't want to reinstall windows you might have to resize the windows partition (depending on how your laptops setup)

my attempt failed

 

but this is coming from someone who should is not the smartiest of people

Best of luck

[Ryujin2003]

50 minutes ago, uzarnom said:

if the issue was having a really shit small resolution that you could not change, install the guests additions cd thing
Up in the top menu there should be a insert guest additions, let that run and you should be able to resize to what ever you want

I would advise using a virtual box unless you need the speed,

My last semester needed a unix environment i dual booted (had a dual core laptop 6GB ram), and for running was great. i installed ubuntu and it handled the dual booting setup (with grub)

but when i wanted to remove it to give more space to my windows install i broke it D:

also if you dual boot and don't want to reinstall windows you might have to resize the windows partition (depending on how your laptops setup)

my attempt failed

 

but this is coming from someone who should is not the smartiest of people

Best of luck

Thanks for the advice. I'm actually trying MS Hyper-V, it seems to be working much easier than VirtualBox. I don't really need the speed. I'm not creating software for Lockheed Martin or anything crazy. It's an intro class.

The last time I dual booted for a class, it was Linux as well, and I had the same issue. When it came time to remove it, I broke my Windows startup. So, I'm just trying to avoid that.

 

[zombie-waffles]

Since it would appear all you really need is a *nix environment for basic terminal use, I would actually strongly recommend either Cygwin or Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10 (but mostly Cygwin).

 

Cygwin has done a great job for me with giving me the ability to do run various command line utilities without leaving my comfortable environment of Windows (and without needing to acclimate with CMD or Powershell). I mean, I've made it through more than a few different courses using multiple different languages with just it and a text editor.

 

You'll be able to do likely everything the teacher requires, which will probably be along the lines of compiling programs (gcc, g++), running interpreted languages/scripts (Haskell, Python, shell scripts), makefiles, and maybe SSH-ing. Hell, you can even run GUI applications by installing (for example) an X-Server package and then launching X versions of applications. And if you want to live the pure terminal life, you can add vim/emacs and gdb and just live there for a while.

 

Pair it with something like apt-cyg, and you have the power of being able to say things like "apt-cyg install git" or "apt-cyg remove tmux", and in my experience, that's really just about all you need.

 

And then I just bring up Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10 because it's new and shiny. I still prefer Cygwin, though, as it allows me some nice conveniences like having access to my Windows PATH variables from within the shell and thus the ability to consolidate them all in a single location.

[Dat Guy]

FreeBSD works great in Hyper-V too. 

[SpaceNugget]

On 19/01/2017 at 11:08 AM, M.Yurizaki said:

That's not what it's used for. It's mostly for system admins who wrote bash scripts and don't want to bother with learning PowerShell in order to do administrative stuff on a Windows machine.

 

From: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/faq

 

I am a software developer typing this to you from my main machine running fedora. For someone who needs to ask this question, Windows bash is plenty to get his/her feet wet.

 

From the link you just posted:

Who is this for?

This is primarily a tool for developers 

and they actually discourage using it to run server programs like webservers or databases:

we do not recommend WSL for server scenarios – Microsoft offers a variety of solutions for running production Ubuntu workloads in Azure, Hyper-V, and Docker.