Newbie questions

[Ed Winchester <edward e winchester lmco com>]

Hello, folks,

First to set the scene, I'm an old guy, in the computer field since
1965.  I have to build a small simulator to simulate a big device that
doesn't exist yet, but its interface is well defined.  It will simulate
that device by communicating via a MIL-STD-1397 type A parallel
interface card, residing in a PC.  Some parts of the simulation will be
done in threads which handle the communications, but some will be done
with some kind of GUI.  I've been doing GIU programming for about 8
years, at one level or another, but almost all with Windows and most
with MFC.  I got permission from the boss to do this project with Linux,
which I have been looking at and reading about for 6 or so years, but
except as a toy, never actually did anything with it.  I bought Eric
Harlow's GTK programming book last night, and see a lot of parallels to
the MFC stuff I did in years past.  I won't have any problems there, I
don't think.  But I have come up with a few questions that maybe you
folks can help me with:

I know that there are other GIU development tools out there, like Qt.
Is GTK+ the best place for me to be starting?  I know, I'm asking to
start a flame war, and this is not my desire.  I really don't know, and
want to know.

I see that GTK+ has some kind of resource files.  Is there any kind of
graphical screen design tool, similar to the Microsoft Resource Editor,
where I can drag and drop controls; use a property box to define their
properties; stretch, mangle and bend them till I get the look I want;
and have all this saved in a file somewhere,  automatically part of my
program?  I know, I'm spoiled, but I'm used to that.

I plan to install the latest 2.4 kernel, Red Hat 7.1 distro.  I'm sure
it will include GTK+, glibc, etc.  Will that be GTK+ 1.2 or 2.0, or
both?  Is there a reason why I would want one over the other?  Also, I
have probably every RH distro from recent years available.  I wanted the
2.4 kernel, because I understand its implementation of pthreads is
better, but am I choosing unwisely here?

How resource intensive is GTK+?  I have freely available a Pentium 166
PC which is compatible with the 1397 card.  Will that be powerful
enough, and how much memory will it need?  It has 16 MB now, which I
know is too little for X, but I could probably get it up to 80 MB pretty
painlessly.  Would that do?

Thanks in advance,
Ed