Re: Newbie questions

[Paul Davis <pbd Op Net>]

>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.

Its mostly a stylistic thing. AFAIK, Qt is a C++ toolkit. GTK+ is a C
toolkit for which there are C++ (and many other) bindings. You should
probably take a look at some GTK+ programs and see what you think. GTK+
uses a layout model inspired by TeX, so its rather different than some
other toolkits which go for a more positional approach to layout.

I happen to dislike GTK+ quite a lot and love Gtk-- (the C++ bindings)
very much. There's no difference in the functionality, just the
programming style engendered by the bindings over the toolkit itself.

>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.

its called Glade. see www.gtk.org for a link, i would imagine.

>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?

The 2.4 kernel is better in every way, but has nothing really to do
with pthreads. pthreads are user-space threads; in the linux
implementation (or rather, the most common linux implementation), they
happen to use a rather gorgeous linux system call called clone(2). but
the kernel's handling of threads has not changed dramatically in quite
some time now. 

>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?

Basically, that will work just fine. GTK+ adds a small chunk of memory
on top of the amount caused by X. Ultimately, its the resources that
your program creates that are more likely to dominate things. Running
the GIMP in 80MB and expecting to work on large images, for example,
is probably going to be a bit disappointing. GTK+ really adds very
little in the way of CPU cycles over X. There is an extra layer of
code for GTK+ event/signal system, but the cost is low compared to the
drawing and computation done by a typical GTK+ program.

--p