As I wait for my Ubuntu CDs to arrive in the mail, I've been piecemealing updates to the old and out-of-date Mandrake 9 distro I have on my computer. Every week I grab packages that I use (or want to use), bring them home, and build and install them.

I'm starting to wonder if I should even bother with Ubuntu when it arrives. I feel that I might be better off going the LFS way right now. The lazy bastard in me says to simply wait.

The thing is, Mandrake 9 can't deal with my computer too well. Apparently my CD-RW is a plain CD-ROM drive, and it refuses to let me use USB devices such as my memstick. For these reasons, Windows is still my primary operating system. (Honestly, though, until I find an IDE as good as Visual Studio's IDE, Windows probably will remain primary, anyway.) But I would like to use Linux more and more.

Right now, the build process for Meldstar's project Asylum is half Visual Studio and half gmake. I'm working on making it all done from make, though, in a way that allows me to use VC++ for compiling on Windows and GCC elsewhere. Until autoconf and automake play nice with native Windows (rather than Cygwin or MinGW) it will involve a bunch of hacks (mainly batch files to call vcvars32.bat and then run msbuild on the project or solution files) that make will rely on.

Single build systems are really the way to go; using the same procedure to build on any platform makes project and build management much easier as there are no conflicting build systems to keep in sync. That allows the project manager to keep to the task at hand - developing the project itself, and not its build procedures.