[Techtalk] Varia

[Jp Calderone]

Davis, Jennifer wrote:

>Thanks to all who responded on the last posting of mine.  I will have
>another look at vi.  I should use it more.  I'm lazy and use pico.  Pico was
>what won on the university Unix machines way back in 1993 when I worte my
>first email, and I haven't been too adventurous.
>
>I am buying a new PC this week, well, new PC parts, and some of the things
>that got thrown in were a scroll mouse and an internet keyboard.  Are there
>howtos or other instruction on how to make them work.  My preliminary
>research came up negative.
>
Scroll mouse, certainly.  Some good info lives at: 
http://www.xfree86.org/current/mouse6.html
I'm not sure about the internet keyboard; normal functions should work, 
and I've heard rumors of
being able to bind the extra keys to something useful, but don't know 
the specifics.

>
>
>Finally, I am curious about is to do with C++.  I realise this is an off
>linux question, but are there freeware, GNU or GPL compilers for Windows?  I
>will learn more about programming if I actually have a use for it (one idea
>is a front-end for my Supreme court tool http://scc.jenn.ca) and the uses
>will more likely present themselves in a work environment than at home.
>
If you want to develop relatively standards compliant C++ on Win32, 
Cygwin is your friend.
It gives you a linux-like environment from which to work, and provides 
as much POSIX
compatibility as possible by wrapping native win32 calls and via the 
cygwin dll.  If, on the
other hand, you're looking to do windows gui development, things are 
tougher.  MSVC++
is really the only tool that will let you write programs that work well, 
but of course it isn't
free...  I haven't tried it myself, but I suppose you might be able to 
get the windows GTK
or Qt bindings to work with Cygwin.

  Jp

>
>
>Thanks
>
>
>Jenn
>