5 ms·

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chai

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

thirdtruck 12y ago
Makes me wonder which distro he's trying to use. My recent install of Mint Linux (on my primary dev box) was a breeze.
jevgeni 12y ago
Sooo, how about taking up the flag?
- icebraining 12y ago
  The engine is proprietary, stefantalpalaru couldn't "take up the flag" even if (s)he wanted.
  - jevgeni 12y ago
    I understand that. But, say I propose to stefantalpalaru to write an engine supporting Linux from scratch. And if that's too hard, wouldn't it be fair to say, that it is also a problem between the chair and the keyboard?
    - wtf_is_up 12y ago
      It depends if (s)he abandons the project because installing a distro is too hard or (s)he had a legitimate roadblock.
      - jevgeni 12y ago
        I'd guess installing a distro and installing a distro with all dependencies for developing a complex game engine might be different things. If they say it's a legitimate roadblock for them, then I tend to believe it.
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      If I ever complain about needing weeks to do something as simple as installing a Linux distro and creating a development environment, feel free to say it.
      - jevgeni 12y ago
        I'm just curios, how would you imagine the dev environment for C4 would look like?
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        Autotools, gcc, needed libraries, binary blob drivers for the video card, a terminal emulator and vim with a bunch of scripts.
        jevgeni 12y ago
        I like how you gloss over the "needed libraries". But seriously, let's take a quick look (here)[http://www.terathon.com/architecture.php http://www.terathon.com/architecture.php] and think, what might be a clear pain point in Linux, even if the "needed libraries" worked perfectly with all the hardware and all distros and the blobs were perfect. Did I hear someone say "Linux sound support"? Yes, that is a correct answer. Sound in Linux is a know clusterfuck. What else might be not as trivial? Did someone say support for multiple graphic cards? Yes, even with OpenGL it might be an issue. Not to mention all the GUI tools. So yeah, those all things obviously would never have any less than functioning dependencies on Linux...
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        Use PortAudio for sound (MIT license), Qt for the GUI and various OS dependent abstractions (threads, mutexes, etc.) - LGPL. If you don't like the OpenGL wrapper from Qt, go with FreeGLUT (MIT) or SDL (zlib license).
        jevgeni 12y ago
Hypx 12y ago
You've described the problem that a lot of developers I know have. Linux just isn't easy to understand, even for programmers, if they don't have a *NIX background to start with.
- sre_ops 12y ago
  If a programmer cannot understand Linux then the programmer is a fraudster.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  Linux is made by programmers, for programmers. If someone can't understand it, maybe it's not Linux's fault.
Arnt 12y ago
Oddly enough, I had a lot of trouble getting my new laptop to boot, work and sleep properly. Not for lack of experience: I first installed linux in the summer of 1992 using hlu's floppies and have used linux for daily work for about 20 of the 22½ years since then. I can easily believe that someone used to windows with its mishmash of installers might have an unpleasant experience. Apt-get works wonderfully on a pristine system, but not so well if the system is halfway upgefucked with tarballs and rm -rf. And particularly if systemd on ubuntu 14.04 supports his hardware as poorly as it supports my new laptop.
- zamalek 12y ago
  apt-get also only works extremely well for FOSS releases. If something is closed source (reality check) the developer will need to maintain the a build for each distro+release. The user will also need to add that apt repo and click through Linux's warnings about that. > What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one. Ironically, it's the political (rather: religious) position of Linux that is getting in the way here. If you're not looking through the rosey colored RMS glasses it's very clear that the dev has taken the practical position. Don't get me wrong, I wish it was different. Linux has amazing potential, but it unrealistically hostile toward these guys. Maybe SteamOS will bring some uniformity to the situation.
  - vetinari 12y ago
    If you build your binaries against Ubuntu 12.04 (=glibc 2.15 symbols), chances are, that it will be extremely compatible with many distributions for years to come. Just make sure you know, what API you are really linking against. The resulting package can install the repo by itself - i.e. user downloads the package, install it and suddenly, he has repo for updates installed. Google Chrome does it, for example.
    - zamalek 12y ago
      Interesting! I assume you would have to statically link all other libs? Distros often swap out e.g. libfoo for foolib and from my own experience that usually ends up being a rabbit hole of "make."
stinos 12y ago
Well all of the 50+ people I know using linux everyday including myself, most of them as their major OS, have encountered these type of issues where you lose huge amounts of time trying to get something rather trivial to work. While your claim "It's between chair and keyboard" aka "yeah that's because they don't know how to do it" is of course perfectly valid, the reason the problem exists in the first place is usually elsewhere. That being said, my last Debian install was pretty much effortless. But I seem to have a machine with which most Linux distors are quite happy :]
- vetinari 12y ago
  While there can be some trivialities that waste huge amount of time on every OS, however, installing Linux and setting up dev environment is not one of them. Certainly not compared to Windows, where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs. It gets into "really not funny" territory when they have conflicting requirements. Compared to that, Linux development environment is a piece of cake.
  - stinos 12y ago
    Sort of agree, the benefits of most linux' distros package managment system combined with lots of open source and gcc binaries being compatible with a quite few versions back are obvious. But that doesn't mean they don't exist partly on Windows. "where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs." is a bit too narrow: that is (afaik) only the case if you use binary distributions of 3rd party libs and only for particular languages like C/C++ and if they make use of the standard libraries and force that upon the user by exporting instances of objects in it - and more often than not I've encountered all sorts of situation where that was not the case: - it's OK to have e.g. a C lib linking against msvcrt x and use it in an application linked against msvcrt y, as long as the API is written properly and doesn't do insane things like trying to free what has been malloc'ed elsewhere - if you have the source, you just build everything with the same VS version and that's it - for C# etc there's a rather decent package manager so that's it as well usually
    - 12y ago
tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
Actually, Eric Lengyel is a well-respected guy and programmer. If an OS takes him long (and by long I mean more than 10 minutes) to install and configure, that doesn't speak all-too-well for that OS.
- qznc 12y ago
  There are so many reports of normal people installing Ubuntu without problems that I'd rather guess he hit some obscure bug.
  - tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
    Admittedly it's not as bad as 5 years, and yes, Ubuntu is ridiculously easy to install if everything goes well. That being said, I think obscure bugs are one of FOSS's biggest enemies. For example, a small and easily-solvable bug with NVIDIA driver can scare off a lot of users.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  Have you seen his coding conventions? http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Coding_Conventions http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Coding_Conventions
  - Arelius 12y ago
    While the website is down, I think it forgets to mention the "Never add comments to any code unless it's explicitly part of the public API." It's also possible he prepossesses the comments out.
  - tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
    I have now :) I disagree with almost everything, but that doesn't make him a bad programmer.
- eyko 12y ago
  OSX takes me about 40 minutes to install and I still speak pretty damn well about it.

> spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working I think we found the problem. It's between chair and keyboard.

thirdtruck 12y ago

Makes me wonder which distro he's trying to use. My recent install of Mint Linux (on my primary dev box) was a breeze.

jevgeni 12y ago

Sooo, how about taking up the flag?

icebraining 12y ago
The engine is proprietary, stefantalpalaru couldn't "take up the flag" even if (s)he wanted.
- jevgeni 12y ago
  I understand that. But, say I propose to stefantalpalaru to write an engine supporting Linux from scratch. And if that's too hard, wouldn't it be fair to say, that it is also a problem between the chair and the keyboard?
  - wtf_is_up 12y ago
    It depends if (s)he abandons the project because installing a distro is too hard or (s)he had a legitimate roadblock.
    - jevgeni 12y ago
      I'd guess installing a distro and installing a distro with all dependencies for developing a complex game engine might be different things. If they say it's a legitimate roadblock for them, then I tend to believe it.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    If I ever complain about needing weeks to do something as simple as installing a Linux distro and creating a development environment, feel free to say it.
    - jevgeni 12y ago
      I'm just curios, how would you imagine the dev environment for C4 would look like?
      - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        Autotools, gcc, needed libraries, binary blob drivers for the video card, a terminal emulator and vim with a bunch of scripts.
        jevgeni 12y ago
        I like how you gloss over the "needed libraries". But seriously, let's take a quick look (here)[http://www.terathon.com/architecture.php http://www.terathon.com/architecture.php] and think, what might be a clear pain point in Linux, even if the "needed libraries" worked perfectly with all the hardware and all distros and the blobs were perfect. Did I hear someone say "Linux sound support"? Yes, that is a correct answer. Sound in Linux is a know clusterfuck. What else might be not as trivial? Did someone say support for multiple graphic cards? Yes, even with OpenGL it might be an issue. Not to mention all the GUI tools. So yeah, those all things obviously would never have any less than functioning dependencies on Linux...
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        Use PortAudio for sound (MIT license), Qt for the GUI and various OS dependent abstractions (threads, mutexes, etc.) - LGPL. If you don't like the OpenGL wrapper from Qt, go with FreeGLUT (MIT) or SDL (zlib license).
        jevgeni 12y ago

Hypx 12y ago

You've described the problem that a lot of developers I know have. Linux just isn't easy to understand, even for programmers, if they don't have a *NIX background to start with.

sre_ops 12y ago
If a programmer cannot understand Linux then the programmer is a fraudster.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Linux is made by programmers, for programmers. If someone can't understand it, maybe it's not Linux's fault.

Arnt 12y ago

Oddly enough, I had a lot of trouble getting my new laptop to boot, work and sleep properly. Not for lack of experience: I first installed linux in the summer of 1992 using hlu's floppies and have used linux for daily work for about 20 of the 22½ years since then. I can easily believe that someone used to windows with its mishmash of installers might have an unpleasant experience. Apt-get works wonderfully on a pristine system, but not so well if the system is halfway upgefucked with tarballs and rm -rf. And particularly if systemd on ubuntu 14.04 supports his hardware as poorly as it supports my new laptop.

zamalek 12y ago
apt-get also only works extremely well for FOSS releases. If something is closed source (reality check) the developer will need to maintain the a build for each distro+release. The user will also need to add that apt repo and click through Linux's warnings about that. > What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one. Ironically, it's the political (rather: religious) position of Linux that is getting in the way here. If you're not looking through the rosey colored RMS glasses it's very clear that the dev has taken the practical position. Don't get me wrong, I wish it was different. Linux has amazing potential, but it unrealistically hostile toward these guys. Maybe SteamOS will bring some uniformity to the situation.
- vetinari 12y ago
  If you build your binaries against Ubuntu 12.04 (=glibc 2.15 symbols), chances are, that it will be extremely compatible with many distributions for years to come. Just make sure you know, what API you are really linking against. The resulting package can install the repo by itself - i.e. user downloads the package, install it and suddenly, he has repo for updates installed. Google Chrome does it, for example.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    Interesting! I assume you would have to statically link all other libs? Distros often swap out e.g. libfoo for foolib and from my own experience that usually ends up being a rabbit hole of "make."

stinos 12y ago

Well all of the 50+ people I know using linux everyday including myself, most of them as their major OS, have encountered these type of issues where you lose huge amounts of time trying to get something rather trivial to work. While your claim "It's between chair and keyboard" aka "yeah that's because they don't know how to do it" is of course perfectly valid, the reason the problem exists in the first place is usually elsewhere. That being said, my last Debian install was pretty much effortless. But I seem to have a machine with which most Linux distors are quite happy :]

vetinari 12y ago
While there can be some trivialities that waste huge amount of time on every OS, however, installing Linux and setting up dev environment is not one of them. Certainly not compared to Windows, where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs. It gets into "really not funny" territory when they have conflicting requirements. Compared to that, Linux development environment is a piece of cake.
- stinos 12y ago
  Sort of agree, the benefits of most linux' distros package managment system combined with lots of open source and gcc binaries being compatible with a quite few versions back are obvious. But that doesn't mean they don't exist partly on Windows. "where you must consider VS/msvcrt version, if you are using third party SDKs." is a bit too narrow: that is (afaik) only the case if you use binary distributions of 3rd party libs and only for particular languages like C/C++ and if they make use of the standard libraries and force that upon the user by exporting instances of objects in it - and more often than not I've encountered all sorts of situation where that was not the case: - it's OK to have e.g. a C lib linking against msvcrt x and use it in an application linked against msvcrt y, as long as the API is written properly and doesn't do insane things like trying to free what has been malloc'ed elsewhere - if you have the source, you just build everything with the same VS version and that's it - for C# etc there's a rather decent package manager so that's it as well usually
  - 12y ago

tdsamardzhiev 12y ago

Actually, Eric Lengyel is a well-respected guy and programmer. If an OS takes him long (and by long I mean more than 10 minutes) to install and configure, that doesn't speak all-too-well for that OS.

qznc 12y ago
There are so many reports of normal people installing Ubuntu without problems that I'd rather guess he hit some obscure bug.
- tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
  Admittedly it's not as bad as 5 years, and yes, Ubuntu is ridiculously easy to install if everything goes well. That being said, I think obscure bugs are one of FOSS's biggest enemies. For example, a small and easily-solvable bug with NVIDIA driver can scare off a lot of users.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Have you seen his coding conventions? http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Coding_Conventions http://www.terathon.com/wiki/index.php/Coding_Conventions
- Arelius 12y ago
  While the website is down, I think it forgets to mention the "Never add comments to any code unless it's explicitly part of the public API." It's also possible he prepossesses the comments out.
- tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
  I have now :) I disagree with almost everything, but that doesn't make him a bad programmer.
eyko 12y ago
OSX takes me about 40 minutes to install and I still speak pretty damn well about it.