I don't know about Solaris, but anyone using Linux has access to the gpl'ed version of Qt.

Qt Designer:


.

Qt Documentation Browser:


er=0>

Far better than anything I've every used on Windows. Considering it's over $1000.00 for a professional/commercial license, you can see why.

If you are interested in Qt:
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/platforms/supported.html
has information on all of the platforms suppported and through what compilers, Solaris is supported with both GCC and sun's own CC compiler. Another site to look at solaris related stuff is http://sunfreeware.com/. Hopefully this helps you.

The only thing that makes solaris barely tolerable is Blastwave

Trust me, I work for a sun partner :)

-oddbot

Hehehe. Now I may be a bit biased, seeing how I use Solaris every day at work, since the place I work at sorta made it. Without trying to rant back at the Solaris sucks comments, here is some info based on my exeriences. I went to UCSD and most of our CS programming classes gave lab access to Solaris boxes. I got by fine using them, but never really got the most out of them. I can honestly say now that you are in a similar (though more disenchanted) spot to where I was, unhappy and struggling with your development environment for two reasons:

1.) You don't have a machine with root access, that you can play with, modify, customize, eventually hose, reinstall and learn to fix. You cannot be a power user without getting this at some point.
2.) You are not a power Unix user, especially so regarding Solaris.

Developing in a default student account on Solaris running CDE...hehe...yeah that sucks yo. Having your own Sun development box...so much more productive than silly Windows.

You are going to a school with an emphasis on engineering. In that world, Solaris has a much better reputation than Windows. Sun hardware is far more robust than x86 hardware. You can do more with older Sun Sparc hardware than you can with older x86 machines. If you *really* care, and don't just want to whine about the situation, buy an Ultra 10 off of Ebay. Put Solaris 9 on it, run gnome. Put Sun Studio 9 on it. Develop your class assignments. Laugh at your classmates complaining about the terrible Solaris environment they have to deal with.

And for the record, I use Solaris, OS X, OpenBSD , and Windows regularly, and various Linux flavors and FreeBSD sporadically. Each have their place, but of the four main ones I use, Solaris = real work, OS X = personal, OpenBSD = home network, Windows = HaloPC until nov 9th.

If you can convince your admin to install it, check out SCons http://scons.org . It's a wonderful new build system which is much more elegant than Make.

I remember when I went to University to learn new things and getting angry that things weren't how I was used to -so I had to learn stuff. I was so angry. :P

Seriouly though, Solaris is used all over the world for very important things. For example, British Telecom's telephone exchanges run on Solaris. People at Stanford know this.

For the editing question: I used to use emacs, but it's laggy over Exceed (remote X Server) so I use vim.

If it helps, watch more kung fu movies and notive the frustration in the apprentice's face when his master makes him work hard -and then how awesome he becomes. :)

[Edited by - flangazor on November 14, 2004 4:54:57 PM]

Quote: Original post by Telamon
They say Stanford is a top university for CS, but the facilities here really don't bear that out. The main student developement machines run _Solaris_. That's right. Ugh. I'm writing some pretty complicated programs for my graduate AI class and writing code in emacs is driving me crazy - I usually write code with Visual Studio in Windows. Typing code into a text editor, hand-editting makefiles, and using the godawful ddd debugger makes me feel like I'm back in the 1980s.

What kinds of tools do professional Unix developers use? Are there any that look and act just like Visual Studio? I'm going crazy...

Do you also still ride a bicycle with training wheels? And do you then mock Lance Armstrong because he doesn't use training wheels?

No? Then why do you rely on your crutch in Visual Studio? And why do you mock Solaris? Any computer geek in 6th grade can operate Visual Studio perfectly. Solaris is possibly the most stable and solid operating system in the world. Someone at Stanford is doing you a great favor in forcing you to learn new development tools.

To me it sounds like you are so far behind that you actually think you're ahead. My only hope is that you aren't really a CS major, and that you are somehow taking this AI class in the CS department as a part of your MIS degree or something. I find it difficult to believe that at a school like Stanford a CS major can make it to graduate work and not be comfortable developing in unix. Or (hopefully) that you're just venting :-)