Re: help me catch up on GTK gui tools

["Peter \"Firefly\" Lund" <firefly diku dk>]

On Sat, 5 Aug 2006, Brett Stottlemyer wrote:

> So to get started and figure out what I want to use, I'm testing out tools
> at home using Solaris 2.10 installed within VMWare Server on a PC (I never
> could get MINGW/MSYS/GTK to work on the PC, plus that wasn't the end system

Testing/playing around will undoubtedly be easier with a modern Linux 
distribution instead of Solaris ;)

Personally, I use Ubuntu Dapper, others may use Fedora or Novell/SuSE.

> anyway).  I know the general advice is to install the binary packages, but I
> don't have much sysadmin experience and this is on a fresh Solaris 10
> install (on my PC) - I figured if I couldn't compile the libraries I'd have
> trouble with any tools using the libraries (this also goes back to the PC
> trouble I had).  So I've spent more than a few days getting gtk 2.10.1 and
> all dependencies compiled.

Which could have been a couple of 'apt-get install' commands or some 
pointing and clicking inside Synaptic with Ubuntu.

I know that you need to get this thing running on Solaris at the end, but 
along the way you also need to try out various alternatives and that might 
(will!) be a heck of a lot easier on something more mainstream.

Regarding getting things built from source: jhbuild might possibly be your 
friend.  It can autodownload from tarballs and CVS (and subversion?) and 
compile the libraries for you.  After it is done you can see what it ended 
up downloading, pack it up, and take it with you to work.

>  My not properly conceived notion was to then get
> gtkglext/glade and the corresponding mm versions and start testing
> development.  Now that I have 2.10.1 compiled, there is no gtkmm 2.10 (2.6
> is the latest stable) and there is a choice with glade v2 (for gtk 2.8) and
> the in-development glade v3.  I also saw a hint that gtkbuilder (in
> development?) is preferred over glade also.

I have only used glade v2 (and v1).  It is ugly and clunky but it gets the 
job done.

>  And I'm not sure which versions
> are compatible with gtkglext.

All of them.

You can name your widgets in the GUI builder and inside your program you 
can get a pointer to any of the named widgets.  If that widget is a 
container, you can easily put your own, manually created, widget into it, 
for example.  Or you could call gdk_gl_window_new() on its GdkWindow 
(accessible in the window attribute of every GtkWidet -- except for those 
that don't have their own window where it is NULL) and then start drawing.

In other words, it matters very little if glade/gtkbuilder has direct 
support for a widget or not.

About your long list of options, I can't really tell which is best. 
All I can say is that I have programmed Gtk+/Gnome in C and Perl with 
very few problems.

Maybe you should just get something running on some libraries that are 
relatively easy to install and see how that goes?

-Peter

PS: Sorry for the convoluted syntax :/