On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 10:59:40AM -0500, Steve Beaver wrote: > First of all I am first and foremost an zOS Systems programmer that only > writes in HLASM and REXX as needed. > > My goal is to learn Linux and then develop in Linux and then as needed port > it to zSeries box. That being said, > > - I am going to build a 64 Bit a box with 16 gig of memory and 8 Tb of > Storage and a DVD/RW. That is the easy > Part.
This much? I think that for merely learning to program in some UNIX flavour you could get away with 1gig and text console. With more memory (I have 12g right now) one can easily run few virtual machines with fully blown production environments (OS + web server + small size database + editors + compilers etc). Of course browser will easily eat 2 gigs of ram, and it is not going to change for the better so I guess 16 will make your computer better suited for meeting future demands of desktop environments. > Does anyone have any input on which version of Linux to purchase? I Know > SUSE has an enterprise 64 bit product? Um, do you have to purchase it, really? They should be freely available for download, too. I am not sure about RedHat and its cousins, however. It was long long ago last time I looked that way. I guess Suse is downloadable. > That is the sum and total of my knowledge of Linux. I recommend some books about "programming in UNIX" if you want to learn C. I guess it does not really matter which one, because at one point it becomes obvious there is plenty of documentation available both hanging on the net and as ready to install packages for your Linux of choice. So you can catch up with the basics of UNIX and then proceed to Linux specifics. You can also program in any language which can be had both on Linux and Z, like perhaps Perl or Python (and certainly Java belongs to both worlds and more - but Java's future seems a little bit uncertain to me). > Can anyone suggest an Editor besides VI, and which language to develop in on > a Linux Platform? Many people claim emacs is The Ultimate Editor Only One We Ever Need and I think there is much truth in this. Still, I use vi (vim - very modern and nice vi descendant) whenever situation makes it more useful or for quick edits of small files. While emacs is much better for those long nightly coding sessions. Just MHO. Overally, your questions are a bit hard to answer. "Editor" for example, has been a word overloaded with meanings. There might be an editor in a classic sense, like vi or emacs. And there might be an IDE, which is like a factory with editor inside, but many people call it editor, too. Myself, I would rather avoid IDEs and languages which make use of IDE obligatory (because the structure/design of such language is such that one cannot do much if anything by merely editing files - for examples, see Visual Basic, which probably cannot be used without specialised IDE at all). I guess the choice of programming language will thus dictate the choice of "editor". So perhaps you should specify this before going further. As of which Linux, I guess you should choose the one that has documentation and tutorials on their homepage. I am long time Debian [0] user [1] but I have no idea if this would be the best choice for you. Sometimes it was not so easy to solve problems, but overally, I was only few times stuck, never frustrated. Given that you can learn, you can learn and see which one is best for you. [0] As far as internet is concerned, there are two major families of Linux distros - one descends from Red Hat (Suse belongs here) and the other descends from Debian (Ubuntu belongs here). Plus few other distros with strong entrenched following, like Slackware (I was there, too) or Gentoo. [1] I am not sure what to think about current direction of Linux evolution, so I keep looking at FreeBSD. They too have some tutorials and whatever one learns on one OS should somehow transfer to another (not 1 to 1 but maybe 1 to 0.75). But as you want to stay connected to z world, I am not sure if FBSD is good idea in your case. It all depends on what exactly you want to do, because majority of tools are available on both OSes, or so I believe. I understand that with Linux one has to display a lot of "do it yourself" attitude, but with FreeBSD even more so (which does not frighten me at all). -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
