looking for a general pointer.

[Roonie]

hey everyone. ive never done anything but basic console programming before and id really like to go graphical. i am thusly beginning a project to create a program with "the works" . . . things like drag-and-drop, graphics dispay, menus and windowwing, etc.

id like to create a program to graphically display and manipulate nodes of a neural system (a collection of nodes and links between them) and be able to "zoom out" and see larger three-dimensional structures . . . or whatever that means . . . i really only have a very fuzzy idea of what, exactly, id like to do . . .

i may or may not be up to something like this (i havent been programming for six years) but im the kind of person that just jumps right in and im looking at linux. (oh . . . you sweet, sexy . . . luscious . . . ohhhh, oh . . . ;))

im a man of open-source and i would love you for some help getting started with linux gui.

[Roonie]

specifically, id just like to know the chain of events so i know what best to plug in to google to get the gory details of how it works . . . wherever they may lurk.

[Roonie]

or even better - what libraries do you guys use? ive been looking at any one i can find and id love to see what people think of them.

(yeah . . . sorry about the triple posting and extreme vagueishness, i can just get on a train sometimes . . . )

[drhowarddrfine]

I'm that same way when I get excited about something. I am not a Linux guy but a Unix/BSD guy so I may misstate something. I used to work for Silicon Graphics and Pixar years ago, too.

X Windows is the windowing and graphics system used on most non-MS Windows systems. The toolkit frequently used to interface to that is either GTK which is used by Gnome desktops or Qt which is used by KDE desktops. But you need neither Gnome nor KDE to do anything graphical; only X. The toolkits just make using X easier.

Then, on top of that, there are graphics libraries, such as OpenGL which I would recommend, but there are others I just can't recall right now.

It's been a long time since I've glanced at anything along these lines so I don't know what books are current or even what the best starting points are but GTK has a tutorial for their toolkits and you'd have to google for Qt's. X has their website and docs.

Hope that gets you started.

[Roonie]

awesome.

yeah, ive been looking around for a little bit and ive just had a problem figuring out what rides on top of what. that should help loads . . . gratzi.