Linux Recommendations

[matematiko]

Hi all,

A less than two years old, very simplistic HP broken laptop was given to me. I fixed it by replacing the hard drive with a used one given to me also. The problem is that the "HP Recovery" partition is gone with the defective hard drive.

I'd like to install linux in this baby to accomplish two things:
1. First and most important: Embrace linux (again), my first attempt was Red Hat 3. something back in the mid 90's.
2. I'd like compile c source (mostly WinBoard and Polyglot) and create executables meant for Windows, is this possible? I mean to compile Windows executables under linux?

For the linux gurus, any recommendations on how to perform number 2 above? And any recommendations on a distro aim for no so novices? I installed Ubuntu 11.04 yesterday I did not like it one bit, feels like it was aimed for kids.

Thanks in advance for any input and have a nice weekend.

matematiko

[John Cheetham]

Well I'm not an expert but I was playing around with a cross compiler a couple of months ago. I managed to compile a simple hello world GTK application on Linux and then run it on Windows XP.

To compile a basic hello world command line app I installed mingw32-gcc:
yum install mingw32-gcc

To compile the application I did:
i686-pc-mingw32-gcc helloc.c

This produces an executable named a.exe which you can run with wine:
wine a.exe

Or you can copy it to windows and run it there.

To compile a GTK app you need to install some more packages (mingw32-gtk2.noarch).

I was using Fedora 14 at the the time. I'm using Fedora 15 now which is using Gnome 3 as opposed to Gnome 2. Gnome 3 is OK but there are a few bugs in it still.
Fedora is OK. They release a new version every 5 or 6 months. Versions are supported for 13 months so you have to upgrade every year (every alternate version) if you want to keep receiving package updates.

CentOS (based on Red Hat) is good in that each version is supported for several years and you don't need to upgrade much. It's good for servers but the packages can be a bit old if you are a developer or need the lastest desktop apps.

Of course there are other good distros. distrowatch.com shows a list of the most popular.

Hope that helps.

JC

[matematiko]

John,

Thanks for the reply, I am long ways to do a cross compile yet(now I know how it is called and this is very valuable to me) but now I know where I can come back and look for some ideas.

Regarding the distro, after an overweening amount of suggestions ( being ironic here...he he), I decided to install what two(maybe more) of my programing heroes/gurus have: Debian, in this case Debian 6 amd64.

Thanks for your response and suggestions.

Best regards,