Datasheet

Figure 1-1 shows the development packages being installed on a Fedora Core 5 system.
Figure 1-1
If you missed the opportunity to add development tools during system installation, you can go back and
add in development tools at a later stage. This is usually best accomplished by using a graphical package
management tool included with you distribution. Graphical package management tools such as yumex
(Fedora), YaST (SuSE) and synaptic (Ubuntu) offer groups of related packages and ease the process of
identifying what components you will need to install. If all else fails, you’ll experience some strange
errors when you try out some of the example code from this book — look out for missing tools.
Setting Up Your Development Environment
A newly installed Linux system will usually automatically load up a graphical desktop environment.
Most Linux systems available today choose either of the GNOME or KDE graphical desktops (or in some
cases both, allowing you to choose which you would like to use). Although this book attempts to be
unbiased as possible, it is nevertheless not possible to cover all technologies to the same degree within a
single volume. As a result, the authors have chosen to focus upon the GNOME desktop environment
whenever it is necessary to talk specifically about desktop-related issues.
GNOME is the default graphical desktop environment used by both the Fedora and Ubuntu projects,
but whatever your personal or organizational preference is, you should find the interfaces appear simi-
lar. You will quickly discover the administration and management tools located in the system menus, as
well as those development tools that have been preinstalled by your distribution. Several distributions
now ship with the Eclipse IDE development environment installed by default—a good place to start if
you’re familiar with other graphical development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.
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Chapter 1: Working with Linux
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