Crown and Cutlass Blog

I dual-boot my laptop with XP and Linux. I am using Linux more and more lately though. Now I pretty much only use XP to try compiling something in Visual Studio, or to play the occasional game. I have traditionally been a RedHat/Fedora user. However, I am getting tired of downloading 3.5 gigs every 6 months to reinstall Fedora. I haven’t had luck in the past with upgrading from one version to the next, although admittedly I haven’t tried it in a few versions. Anyway, I finally decided to try out Ubuntu. With a few dumb exceptions, it seems pretty slick. It was a single CD download, the install was easy, and I managed to get the old Crown and Cutlass code running successfully. However, I am surprised how much work it is to set up a development box. I expected that I’d be able to just check a box for “Development Tools” in some install dialog. Instead I had to install each piece separately. Some things were installed in the “build_essentials” but that was pretty minimal. It seems like almost everyone who installs gcc will want the autotools at some point. Native Eclipse also seems much slower than in Fedora 5. It is almost unusable. However, since Sun has opened Java, I’m hoping that Eclipse will work better out of the box in the next release.

My main issue with Ubuntu is the age of some development packages in the repositories. For example, the Eclipse CDT is one version out of data while Eclipse itself is the most recent version. Even worse, the version of Ogre in the repository is 1.0.7 which is almost a year old! As you can imagine, a lot has changed between 1.0 and 1.4. Our Ogre test doesn’t even compile with it. As a result, I have had to compile my own version of Ogre. That’s not too bad, but it would make things a little easier if I didn’t have to. We talked about contributing a new package, but decided that since we will need to do some compiling anyway it would be better to use the CVS version of Ogre. That way when 1.4 is released we will not need to unlearn anything, and hopefully we’ll be ready to start releasing some code before any more major version changes in Ogre.

Anyway, it just doesn’t seem like developers are the target audience for Ubuntu. So far things seem to be working well enough that I don’t want to go through the trouble of returning to Fedora, but a little better developer support in Ubuntu sure would be nice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Linux, Ogre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.