Experiments with Linux

In my last entry I asked myself a lot of questions mainly pertaining to the architecture of the project. The first of these was "Should I make the code platform-independent, including the client?" Morde was designed for Windows and I had no real means to test it on anything else. I never did much with it other than connect up a handful of clients to my server on my LAN. For Mod Wars, I'd like people to actually play it! That would require getting the server hosted, and after searching the web for games hosting companies, I found that all of them run Linux / Unix boxes unless you are hosting a Windows-specific game such as a Counter-Strike server or something.

So that solidified the decision to at least make the server cross-platform but what about the client? From a coding perspective, all the libraries I intend to use are already cross-platform. For example, SDL, boost etc. The main difficulty is getting started with a Linux build, having a single code-base that could be built on both Linux and Windows etc but I would have to deal with all this stuff for the server anyway so its just a natural extension to make the client cross-platform also. Plus, it widens the potential player base.

So this weekend, I took a big plunge! I've had an old PC sitting under my desk now for several months. A while ago I tried re-installing it (with Windows) to get it ready to sell but I kept getting the BSOD and I couldn't re-install it because it didn't like my SATA drive, despite me repeating the same steps as I took the first time I installed it. Anyway, I thought this would make a fine and dandy Linux box so I downloaded a copy of Fedora 5, burnt it to a DVD and booted it up...

First time around I had some issues setting up drive partitions (I was trying to be too complicated I think), so I re-did that bit just creating a few largish partitions for the /home and /usr directories. The DVD came with Gnome & KDE and had a whole bunch of development stuff like KDevelop, boost libraries, SDL and lots more. All in all, a quick and smooth install.

I haven't done much with it yet other than have a play and try to find my way around it. I loaded up KDevelop and tried to build a hello world application. I was a bit confused to find that the default hello world project created about 20 files in the project directory but I guess thats the linux way :-)

Connecting to the internet was simply a matter of plugging in an ethernet cable that was connected to my router. I was even able to get the Linux box to see the Windows machines that I had on the network; something that didn't work the other way around! I need to get a new monitor before I can really do much, as at the moment I'm just switching between my Linux and Windows boxes but I had a good start anyway.