Ok right now the porject I am involved which is trying to desdie which linux distro we should taget for programming. At first we were thinking between RedHat, Suse, and Mandrake/Mandriva becuase in our opinion those were the most widely used ones, I mean before I even really knew about linux I new about RedHat and Suse. then after seeing that redhat cost 179 we desides against that, yes i know about the Fedora Project but I now that when you want to upgrade something you have to recompile it and that is just a pain in the ass and we want to focus on programming. so looking at the prices of Suse and Mandrake/Mandrive, Suse it 59 and Mandrake/Mandriva is i belive 66 per year for there club which provides support, but we can download for free with no support. Another thing that we are looking for is a descent C++ IDE that is free or cheap, we already have Visual Studio for PC development. Never really been able to find any that great but just looking around and found Sun Studio 11 with looks like it might be good, it free which is nice, but from there requirements, it state you need RedHat or Suse. so are there any of these or other ones you would recommand for targetting a linux platform for our project. Oh our project is an game engine.

if you write it well it should work anywhere...
At most you're going to be dependent on either Gnome or KDe.

Most commercial products state specific distros because that's the only ones they've been tested on and the only ones available to support engineers.

Check out Fedora Core, its the free version of Red Hat. But as stated above, if your code is written well and modular, it should be easily ported to most Unix / Linux Systems.

Thier website is: http://fedora.redhat.com/

Bill

Well we are looking for the distro that we will be testing under and making sure it works under.

Billr17:
I do explian why we do not want to use Fedora in my orignal post.

Quote:Original post by 3dmodelerguy
Billr17:
I do explian why we do not want to use Fedora in my orignal post.

Yes, you say than on Fedora you need to recompile things when you want to upgrade. This is untrue. The only distro's I know where you are often compiling stuff are Gentoo and SourceMage, and even those can work with precompiled packages.

You need to do what Babbling said. You aren't targetting distros so much as package types. For that you have RedHat/Fedora/Mandriva/SuSE on the RPM side, and Debian, Ubuntu,etc on the .deb side.

However, if you are just looking for a dev platform it should not matter. They all pretty much work the same and are built with the same tools and apps. Making a program "work" on another distro is just a matter of making sure the dependent libs are installed. It's not as if it's a whole different OS.

That said, just pick whichever one you think suits your own personal tastes for work environment.

Well the person I am working with does not want to use Fedora to develop with and that is fine with me. I guess the better question would be which Distro to develop with.

well the major problem i have with linux and the the distro is that you say that if it runs on one it will run on the others. well with all the different verison or libraries out the and one using XFree86 2.5 and the other using XFree86 3.0 and others like that is that in order for your program to run on there distro they need to upgrade the library but what if they need one of them for another program to use. I mean this shit just make me think if it is even worth deveolping on Linux.

Personally I use Debian testing because it's reasonably up to date, easy to maintain/upgrade and has about 10 million software packages. It's got a couple of glitches in at the moment (for instance the Anjuta IDE doesn't work), but I've had no trouble at all programming on it. The only Linux IDE I've really tried is KDevelop, which is fine, but for some reason I just keep winding up using Emacs again (this is probably due to some bizarre personality twist, I just can't work out why IDEs are so great). Anyway that's more to do with ease-of-development than anything else, but really I suspect most Linux software with multiple developers is written on whatever distro each one of them likes best, it doesn't matter much.

Edit: XFree86 2.5/3.0??? I think it's fair to say if anyone uses those any more they don't expect to play games. Don't even look at less than 4.0. Anyway it looks like the X.org fork is taking over and XFree86 is going to die, but don't worry it doesn't break any binary compatibility. I'm sure there are some extensions which have changed but as long as you use reasonably common libraries (libjpeg, libpng, zlib, X, GL for instance) you'll be fine.