Monday, November 26, 2007

I CAN program my way out a paper bag!

Plastic might be a problem though.

The point I'm making is that I need a C compiler for XP. Anyone know a good one?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Google's your friend. In less than 5 seconds I found

http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/cpp.shtml

which lists a free (the first one's free, kid) thing from Microshaft. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/

There's other stuff to be found via google too like http://www.codegear.com/downloads/free/cppbuilder

Rake said...

Google's a better friend than that, as it turns out! It introduced me to something called "Cygwin", which I'd had no clue existed.

Perfect. Now I get that part of Linux that I need most, without having to teach Cindy how to use (not destroy) a dual boot system. Awesome!

Anonymous said...

Why on earth were you dual-booting, though? Even I have given up on that - heck; the last time I set up a dual-boot box with XOSL was a year ago... nowadays, I simply attack yet another old box, beat it into submission, and load whatever suits my "purpose" onto it so that it becomes yet another standalone "experimental" thing.

Indeed; about the only thing I've done in the "cross-compatibility" arena lately was to throw a 2K install into a virtualbox VM on my work laptop so I could run some work-related VisualBasic-based piece of trashware that wine consistently gagged upon. Other than that nasty episode, I've been finding that this shiny new linux laptop has been meeting all of my needs... as well as getting all of my real-world work done.

In fact, I've been throwing PCLinuxOS onto just about *everything* these days... even my wife uses it now, on her little Celery-400-based Fujitsu laptop (which despite being such a "lowly" Celery-400-powered antique, nevertheless manages to play fullscreen video smoothly. Ask Zarq... he couldn't believe it either! :-))

It was never able to do that before, when it was running its original Windows 98SE... sort of a testament, I guess, as to how far linux has come along - even compared to only one year ago. Well - colour me amazed! And happy.

Anonymous said...

For my needs, Linux makes a much better program than an operating system. When it comes down to it, all I need from it is bash and gcc. Cygwin does that just fine for me.

I have one (1) computer, you see, and the other half just don't react real well to Linux. And the sad fact is, I don't really blame her: Things just don't seem to work out of the box. Better chance if it's part of the original install, but adding something later? It takes a lot of work to make Linux work well enough for *me* to use, never mind her!

Anonymous said...

Well, to be honest about it, my needs are pretty minimal - you know I don't do any programming; all I really need to do is to access the internet, download the occasional rare thing, play the odd old Windows game, run a couple of work-related Winprogs, watch some videos, twiddle around with a few music files, edit or alter some pictures, scan some more in, print them, make a few .pdf files, run some splashy Compiz~Fusion eyecandy on multiple desktops, and do it all on crappy old antique AT-based hardware that nobody in their right mind would ever bother to stoop to or otherwise admit to dealing with in this day and age because that would be hopelessly retarded.

I guess the real point is that if things hadn't gotten really nasty on the internet, why hell - I'd _still_ be happily running Windows 98! But; things change - and the internet definitely did take a turn for the nasty.

At first it was mere annoyance - one day I aimed my trusty old IE5 at the CBC website, and suddenly that site would no longer load. So I swore loudly at the cretinous bastards who'd changed it, and began to get all my news from the BBC instead. But then, several months later, the whole system up and died on me - the machine I'd *thought* to be internet-immune due to its sheer weight of near-complete obsolescence had suddenly become totally pwned.

I promptly built another 'virgin' '98 box, installed McAfee with the very latest up-to-date DATfile, as well as the very latest Kaspersky and SpyBot-et-al, and began to scan the original '98 drive - and that's when I realised that it had all gotten well beyond my abilities... because none of them could find a blasted thing. I put the original drive back into the original box, hooked up the 'net connection, fired the rig back up - and lo and behold, there it is again - the ADSL modem flashing constantly, like a crazed ex-biker cop on some heavy meth trip. Popups were opening faster than the memory could keep up with, and the mouse pointer was doing strange Ouija-like movements - of entirely its *own* accord. So I knew darned-well that the thing was still possessed, and that the whole 'scanning' exercise wasn't worth even the effort of a fart in a hurricane.

So I rebuilt the box with a fresh clean drive, and for the next few months I ran QNX. It never got pwned after that - I could see the *incoming* modem lights flashing madly, but the TX did absolutely nothing more than *I* ever told it to. But - alas; I began to miss my downloading. And I was getting pretty sick and tired of Firebird 0.7 crashing on every third website, too.

My next step was to try the same old Ubuntu CD that you'd taken a liking to. I found that the clock wouldn't set right or recognise my timezone properly, nor was I ever able to set the monitor resolution and refresh to anything even approaching (for me) 'truly useful'... and the final death-knell for that effort was the constantly-annoying "lack-of-root-access" hassle. So, I ditched it and immediately embarked upon a prolonged and agonising effort of 'distro-hopping'. RedHat wouldn't load at all... SuSE was so bloated it ran like a pig on greased stilts and was liable to bomb on the slightest upgrade... Knoppix ran fine but I couldn't deal with it easily enough... Vector ran really fast, but would lose its sound settings and driver after a week or two... Slackware was far too daunting... Mepis ran reasonably well, but wouldn't accept my settings, like Ubuntu... Kororaa had the cool OpenGL eyecandy like SuSE, but wasn't very stable... on and on and onward I trudged and slogged, until eventually I stumbled across PCLinuxOS... and suddenly, everything started *working*! So I dedicated myself and my boxen to that, and that's what I'm still using.

And the whole point is that I _don't_ have to screw with it - I just install it, configure it, and *use* it. I _don't_ need to worry about constantly upgrading any worthless bloody virus scanner DATfiles or whatever, nor feveriskly applying each and every single Micro$oft "security patch" religiously - I just turn my boxes on, and they work. And that's all I ever really wanted from a computer anyway, so I'm happy.

Anonymous said...

And now for my next trick:

http://www.tonyrogers.com/humor/images/beerguysintogirls_lo.jpg

Anonymous said...

Oh, phoob! That didn't translate too well. What's wrong with this blogger-thingy? It can't accept long URL pastes, or what? *Sigh*... here's the missing tailbits:

/images/beerguysintogirls_lo.jpg

Some assembly required, apparently. [Shrug]