Adventures in Linux Programming
by Rildo Pragana
Lowrent gone away :( But now I'm back in Xoom, another fine free page
service in the net.
Please wait, as I'm reconstructing all my offerings... Many news to
arrive!
What's new...
-
01/08/1999 Updated several chapters of the seminar.
-
01/06/1999 Chapter 4 (shell) revised in the seminar. Please check it!
-
01/03/1999 Initial (beta) version of a seminar
I will present for Linux beginners. Mostly sys admin stuff. Read this first.
-
12/18/1998 In "Forms for a database application"
we continue our forms interface for PostgreSQL in tcl/tk.
-
12/13/1998 In "Stealing other's code" we discuss how to do a nice form editor
for databases.
|
|
Introduction
These are just a few incursions in software development I have done with
Linux.
I like Tcl/tk as a wrapper language, mainly because of it' simplicity. I have
not much time to spend learning several hundreds API entries, and I prefer C
to C++. I think OO-design is a good thing, but OO-programming not. It's
assumptions of code reuse are hard to be met, because each one has a
(distinct) way to think in a problem or algorithm.
Well, let us leave those religious questions to a later time and let's go
to...
|
Linux software
Slidedraw
A slide presentation drawing program. Make your presentations shine. In
Tcl/tk.
My friend David Suarez de Lis has
been kind enough to maintain a web page on this subject. You may find in his
Official Slidedraw
Homepage many nice things about this program. Anyway, you may pick here my most recent snapshot.
SlideWidget
A new widget for tk I am writing to replace canvas in Slidedraw, getting more
speed, zoom, backgrounds and other niceties. This is still very alpha, as
nobody (except myself) have tried it yet. I would like to have at least some
reports on how is it doing, please. Take it here.
Gscan
This is an old try to make a (user) device driver. I have bought a Genius
Scanner Color Page-CS and this is to make it work under Linux. You may find it
at Sunsite.
Driver for the KeenView
KeenView (TM) is a piece of hardware I have done with a PIC and a couple of
ICs. With a LCD display and interface for a standard PC keyboard, it turns
itself a very cheap POS terminal for small stores. The line is multipoint
RS-485 and its software is a simple device driver with VT52 emulation. This
software serve only as an example of implementation for devices under Linux,
unless you have the real hardware. Here is
it.
Before reading this course, please notice this is unfinished, in portuguese,
and may be not very advanced for you. Translators are welcome for changing
this to english. I have plenty of work to do and can't do it just now, sorry.
If it doesn't matter to you (for instance, you're portuguese or brazilian :) ,
please continue here.
Some hardware projects
If you want to do something with hardware, specially microcontrollers, I would
recommand you Microchip's PIC series. They are small things but very
powerfull. I have submitted some projects of mine to Picpoint .
Miscellaneous
I am discussing here some points that may be of interest to beginners in
Tcl/tk. Please check this guide .
If you have some questions to be answered, send to my e-mail address, and I'll answer it
here when time allows.
If you are unsecure of how to do some simple commands (well, not so simple
sometimes), you can look on how do I
do . If you write in portuguese (BTW, I'm brazilian), perhaps you
find useful my brazil.tar.gz file. Put
it in your
/usr/lib/kbd/keytables/ directory and change your rc.local to load it
with loadkeys. To key in accented characteres, you may type the
accent with AltGr and then the vowel, or use directly AltGR +
{a,s,d,f,e,r,u,i,o,p,l, and c} to see the shortcuts I've done. (I only use
this last, faster way)
About myself
I'm graduated physicist, but since 1974 I've been working with computers and
digital electronics. I decided to change to Linux the first time I hear about
it. I used to program in Msdos/Windows before and have spent very much time
disassembling msdos code to figure how to program with it. Never
more...
I'm married and have two boys (now they are somewhat grown) 20 and 14 years
old. I live in a country house near Recife, northeast of Brazil. I have
built at a side of my house a small office/lab where I work most of my time,
doing consulting in FPGA design, industrial controllers, and systems
programming.
|
|
Favorite places
The best site of Linux software is Sunsite.
The best Linux distribution, if you don't fear to wet your feet is Slakware.
If you want news, try Linux
Today, with daily updates. News without noise for serious users.
