Archive for the ‘linux’ Category

Why I’m spending more time in Linux and less in Windows XP

Thursday, February 17th, 2005
  • The ProMepis Linux distribution automatically installs a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver on my laptop
  • While the GUI is slower and less polished, I can tweak it to my heart’s content.
  • While Firefox is slower, it’s getting faster, and via the magic of Debian packages it’s automagically upgraded to the latest version on a regular basis (along with the rest of the software on my system). For example the HTML rendering component in my current Firefox browser is from February 10th, a mere 7 days ago.
  • The following software has become crucial to my project work: Objective Caml, Coin3D, Cairo, LablGL, LablGTK2 (with native code & GtkGLArea support), and MPICH
    Each can be installed on a Debian Linux system like ProMepis with one line (“apt-get install [packagename]“). Compare that to how long it would take to get them all installed under Windows XP (hint: I’ve spent many hours trying to get just lablgtk2 working right under either Visual Studio or MingW, to no avail)