Archive
More Restructuring
Okay, a quick update on the site’s pending rearrangement. Firstly, tutorials are in fact going to stay as posts, not pages. I decided I didn’t want a static front page, but I don’t want general “blog” content on the front page either, so thing’s will have to stay as they are. Secondly, I’m finding more and more as I write tutorials that I have to bother going into detail about which software to install and so on and so forth. This is not only time consuming for me, but also probably annoying for the majority of you who have the software already. But I have a solution: I’m going to write a few new posts about setting up “development environments” on Windows and Unix. Then, when I do a tutorial, I’ll just assume you’ve done all the setup in the other post. In fact, I’m thinking I might more generally put a little “prerequisites” and “recommended reading” section at the top of each tutorial. That way, we can focus on the new stuff, but all the background material is easily available to those who need it.
Summary of Content
Naturally there’ll be one for Windows and one for Linux/Unix, each with various subsections. Now, I don’t want to spend too long writing these setup tutorials, but I do want to keep everyone happy 
So here’s a quick list of what I’ll cover in each one – lot me know if there’s anything you really want added!
Windows
- Visual C++
- MinGW
- Code::Blocks
- MSYS
Linux/Unix
- GCC
- Code::Blocks
- Text editor (e.g. vim)
Generic
- CMake
- Doxygen
- Git
- Subversion
These last few will be covered in both tutorials, although the specifics will be a little different of course.
Poised to Overclock
Right. Unfortunately I just haven’t had the time to write any posts about building Boost today… The computer’s been out of action all day so far as I’ve been replacing my broken motherboard and installing my after market heatsink and fan, which I I mentioned a few days back. So instead, I’ll just share a few words about that and Boost can wait until tomorrow.
I can certainly say that the fan is really, really quiet, and temperatures appear to be lower than with the stock cooler (I say stock – it certainly looks like Intel’s socket 775 stock cooler, but the fan has an Akasa sticker…). I haven’t had a chance to do any temperature readings under stress yet, so we’ll see how things go. When I have a chance I’ll be trying a little light overclocking too so I’ll let you know how that goes… I’m hoping to get my 2.83Ghz CPU up to a stable 3.4, but I haven’t overclocked before so I don’t know if that’s realistic with my relatively cheap cooler.
At present, I am just reinstalling all my Windows software. I’m hoping to have a minute to play around with ASUS Express Gate, since it appears not to be working out of the box… And then? Well it’s coming up to midnight local time and yet I’m still hoping to not only reinstall Linux Mint, but also successfully install Gentoo (which involves compiling my own kernel 
). Still, I’ll see how things go, and I’ll try to sleep a little bit before my early start tomorrow…
Automatic SFML 2.0 Build – Unix
As you know, I’ve been providing prebuilt SFML 2.0 binaries for Windows (both MinGW and MSVC) for a while now (new ones will be out soon, by the way…)
I don’t really want to provide prebuilt binaries on Unix right now, but instead I’ve written a little script which will build them for you. All you do is run the script. Then it goes ahead and downloads the source, runs CMake and then builds and installs the binaries, header files, examples and documentation. You can go ahead and download the script, but read on a bit so you know what you’re doing. And of course, if you don’t trust me, you can always read through the script yourself 
I’m sure it’s not very robust at the moment, so let me know if you have any issues with it. I’ll try to fix them as soon as possible. If you do come up against problems, you can probably just delete the directory it created and run it again. Oh, and you can run it a second time to check for source code updates and recompile.
Anyway, all you have to do is download the script, put it in the desired directory, e.g. ~/Development, make it executable and run it (probably with no options, but see below for details).
chmod +x InstallSFML.sh ./InstallSFML.sh
Warning: If you install SFML to the default location of /usr/local, it will override any older versions (e.g. SFML 1.6) already installed in /usr. If you wish to continue using an already installed older version, read on to learn how to install SFML to an alternate location.
Usage Notes
There are just a few details of usage which I’d like to share. Firstly, as you probably know, certain tools and libraries are required for the build. Namely, the script invokes CMake, make, git and doxygen. In fact, the script can have a go at installing these for you. Just run it with the -t switch. However, it handles this in a very primitive way. It installs them using apt-get so it’s specific to Ubuntu, Linux Mint and the like. Also, of course, the package names may change a little in the future (for example, git-core recently became simply git).
As for the libraries, you can try the -l switch. However, I’d say this is even less reliable. Again, it relies on apt-get and moreover it depends on the particular package names. However, I’ll try to keep these up to date so that it works on Ubuntu-like OSs at least. Anyway, if you have trouble with installation of packages or tools, let me know so I can look into it.
If you can’t get these features to work, don’t worry. The rest of the script should run fine, you’ll just need to ensure that the following tools are installed, along with the dependencies specified here.
- CMake
- GCC/Make
- doxygen
- git
There are just two last options. You can specify -D directory to have SFML installed into directory rather than the default location of /usr/local. And you can specify -S directory to have the SFML source downloaded into directory rather than a new subdirectory called SFML of the active directory. If you specify an existing directory (or if you use the defaults and there is an existing directory called SFML in the current active directory) then the script will check if it’s a Git repository. If so, it will update the repo and then build and install as normal; if it’s not a repo, it will give you the choice to cancel the operation or to delete the directory and re-clone the source from Git Hub.
GoingNative 2012: Minus 1 Day « Sutter’s Mill
You’ve probably already heard, but there’s a big upcoming C++ conference from everyone’s favourite friendly software giant, Microsoft. Actual seats are, of course, all booked up. But you can watch online. If you can spare the time, watch as many as you can. It’s a great opportunity to learn the language from the big names of the industry, including Bjarne Stroustrup himself! And they’ll be available on demand, as well as live, so there’s no excuse to miss them. Have fun!
Donations!
I’ve just added a donations button to the site. You’ll see it in the top right hand corner, and you can also find one on the donations page. I understand that most of you probably can’t spare any cash – especially right now in the midst of the economic crisis – but if you can, donations would be appreciated. I want to get more tutorials up and coming again, but it does take a lot of time and time costs money…
Thanks everyone!
Herb Sutter – A Passing of Giants
We’ve lost Dennis Ritchie, John McCarthy and Steve Jobs this month, and as such Herb Sutter wrote a short poem. You may as well take a look if you haven’t already.
Dennis Ritchie
I know I’m a bit late to the scene, and I don’t think it’s worth my trying to write a piece on Dennis Ritchie as there are so many good ones already out there. However, I think it’s a great shame that his death passed by almost unnoticed for the general public, perhaps cast into shadow by that of Steve Jobs, whose contributions may be easier for the average user to appreciate. Nonetheless, Ritchie’s work for the advancement of computing and technology was outstanding. I would argue even greater than Jobs’. He designed C, one of the most influential and powerful programming languages of all time. He helped develop Unix, and made it the first portable operating system. He won countless prizes. We at least in the technological world should not let his passing go unsung.
I’ll leave you to your day now, but let’s not let people forget Dennis Ritchie and the great things he’s done for computing and technology. I took the liberty of linking to some other articles below. At least take a glance at the first two.
Related articles
- Dennis Ritchie (Sutter’s Mill)
- Dennis Ritchie Day (radar.oreilly.com)
- Two major CS deaths (gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com)
- In Memoriam: Dennis Ritchie, Ph.D. (infosecurity.us)
- Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011 (iontech.wordpress.com)
- Dennis Ritchie left this world like he lived in it, quiet and behind the scenes… (michaelthinks.typepad.com)
- RIP Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C and father of UNIX (tranphuochung.wordpress.com)
Integers… and Sheep
Hi there! Was just wasting away my time clicking the ‘random‘ button on xkcd (just joking – time on xkcd is never wasted), when I came upon this programming related sketch which I thought I’d share. Enjoy!
xkcd - Can't Sleep
Linux Distros
Image via Wikipedia, attribution: Larry Ewing
Hi again! Firstly, sorry for the lack of posts recently. I’m at school. I’m doing my masters early. In short, I’m rather busy. I promise I’ll start doing tutorials again when I have the chance. Hopefully by then a stable SFML 2 release will be out, just as the icing on the cake!
Anyway, in the mean time – indulge me! I just upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 and it completely broke my Ubuntu install. Having quickly learnt how to log in and manually mount an NTFS partition on the recovery terminal, I managed to recover my encrypted home directory and its contents. However, I am now in the position of having to set up my Linux install on the weekend.
Now, I could just revert to Ubuntu 11.04 and wait for 11.10 to become a little more stable. OR! I could try another distribution for a change. I’m thinking about Fedora, Linux Mint, Mandriva Linux and Arch Linux.So, let me know which you think I should try – or indeed whether I should stay with Ubuntu or try yet another distribution. Vote on the poll. Feel free to add extra OS choices (all free Unix ones though please!). And, while we’re on the subject of operating systems, you can also vote to tell me which one(s) you use! Most importantly of course, comment to let me know why you think what you think about OS choice and Linux distros. Have fun!
Oh, and before I leave you to vote and comment, one other thing. Although the blog’s been quiet – and may well remain quiet for a while – please do still subscribe by RSS, email, WordPress or whatever you prefer! That way you’ll be among the first to hear when I’m back. Until then,
Xander
Related articles
- Introduction to the “Best Linux Distro 2011″ Series (pcandpenguin.wordpress.com)
- Get multiply Linux Distros from NetBootCD (beast4romtheeast.wordpress.com)
- Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Is Out Now With New Default Programs [Linux] (makeuseof.com)
- Linux Distro: Tails – You Can Never Be Too Paranoid (btconsultare.wordpress.com)
- How to Choose a Linux Distro (zerinsakech.wordpress.com)
