I don't claim to have much experience in writing games on Linux, so I would welcome some help to improve this page.
Linux Distributions
Could anyone advise me what is the best distribution for people who are planning to write and use 3D software? Is there any advantage in getting the professional versions of this software if you are doing local development and are not planning to setup a server?
Red Hat Linux 9 Personal (see also http://www.redhat.com/)
Make sure you get the right version there is Personal, Professional and Advanced
Server , there are also versions for iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, S/390 and the
Itanium Processor.
SuSE Linux 11.0. Operating system with a wide range of applications
including Open Office. A good distribution for developers as it contains KDevelop.
Java, Mono, etc. Can install itself as a dual-boot system with an existing Windows OS if required.
For information about installing it see this
page.
Mandrake Linux Standard Edition 8.2 (
Edition 8.0) see also http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/
Make sure you get the right vesion, there are 3 versions Linux 8.2 ProSuite
Edition: The Linux server solution(Available in English and French), Mandrake
Linux 8.2 PowerPack Edition: Linux for workstations(Available in English, Spanish,
Italian, German and French) and Mandrake Linux 8.2 Standard Edition- Available
in English German and French).
Mesa
If your Linux installation does not have OpenGL support you will need to install Mesa. If you already have OpenGL installed then skip this stage, for example I am using Red Hat 6.2 and I did not need to install Mesa.
If you don't have it already, install Mesa from their website
Mesa is a 3-D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL
Download MesaLib-3.3.tar.gz and optionally MesaDemos-3.3.tar.gz
Unpack with:
gzcat MesaLib-3.3.tar.gz | tar xf -
gzcat MesaDemos-3.3.tar.gz | tar xf -
gunzip MesaLib-3.2.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaLib-3.2.tar
gunzip MesaDemos-3.2.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaLib-3.2.tar
or
tar zxf MesaLib-3.2.tar.gz
tar zxf MesaDemos-3.2.tar.gz
Are there any sites which can advise people about
GUI
Most people these days like to use a graphical interface. I find it annoying that Linux users and programmers have to choose between KDE and Gnome. Could anyone give me some unbiased advise about which is best for 3d programers without stating a format war?
Linux Programming Tools
I assume that all distributions come with C/C++ command line tools? Are there any beginners guides on the Web? If you want to use a Graphical IDE (I know some people prefer command line tools but I can never remember the commands) you could try some of the following. Could anyone advise me which is best for 3D development?
- http://www.wxwindows.org/ - A cross-platform framework
- http://www.kdevelop.org/ - IDE for KDE
- http://glade.gnome.org/ -user interface builder for Gnome and GDK+
- http://www.eclipse.org/ - IBM IDE
- QT A C++ class library for GUI programming
Using Java on Linux
If you have not already done so load the latest version of Java for linux from the blackdown website.
Unpack it to suitable directory:
cd /usr/local
gunzip /jdk-1_2_2-rc3-linux-i386_sh.gz
./jdk-1_2_2-rc3-linux-i386_sh
Make sure path is set:
export PATH=/usr/local/jdk1.2.2/bin:$PATH
Download and install Java3D for Linux
bunzip2 java3d1_1_3-fcs-linux-sdk_t.bz2
./java3d1_1_3-fcs-linux-sdk_t
see http://www.blackdown.org/java-linux/jdk1.2-status/README-3D
Apologies to Richard Stallman
I have used the word Linux here where I probably mean GNU/Linux. Its just that putting GNU/Linux everywhere seems over pedantic and makes the page more difficult to write and read. While I'm apologizing I'm probably writing 'Open Source' where I mean 'Free software'. Could anyone give me a simple one sentence definition of these terms?
