Re: Newbie questions

[<skip pobox com>]

Ed,

I'm new to gtk as well, but will give you my perspective nonetheless (as I'm
sure several other people will).

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

Gtk certainly seems to have a lot of momentum at the moment.

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

I think you will want to look at glade.

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

Even-numbered minor versions (2.0, 2.2, 2.4, ...)  are stable versions.  Odd
one are development versions, so I think you should be okay with 2.4, though
I haven't tried it.  There are api differences between Gtk 1.2 and Gtk 1.3.
I think all Linux distributions that ship Gtk will ship with 1.2.something.
If you're planning new development work you will want to at least keep your
eye on 1.3 series.  Almost all the documentation you will find today is for
the 1.2 series.

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

It might, though you are going to have to wait awhile for compiles.  I do
development on a 450-MHz (mobile) PIII laptop with 128MB of memory.  It's
sufficient as long as it doesn't page, which in this day and age happens
quite a bit.  Many people have 256MB or more on development machines.

I recommend you also take a look at the various interpreted languages that
support Gtk interfaces.  I use Python, but Perl and Ruby both have Gtk
interfaces as well.  I suspect any of them will drastically reduce the
number of lines of code you need to write to generate an interface (I know
using Python will).  I'm not sure what languages glade interfaces to besides
C, but I'm pretty sure there's Python support available.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip pobox com)
(847)971-7098