Comments | simianpower: Help me with Linux!

simianpower

Help me with Linux!

Aug 30, 2009 00:35

For those of you who do not know either Linux or networking, ignore this please. For the rest of you: please help me figure out this maze of distributions! How do you tell apart Debian vs Ubuntu vs Red Hat vs whateverthefuck? Also, any help with Linux networking (TCP/IP application development) would be appreciated. I don't know where to start!

Comments 5

Centos fdmts August 30 2009, 06:23:10 UTC

Redhat is a company. Once upon a time, they gave away a free linux distribution that was Corporate Good. They sold support contracts on that OS. It was the bomb ( ... )

Re: Centos simianpower August 31 2009, 03:51:08 UTC

Thanks for the summary. I heard today that Redhat is still free... but then I saw this. Confusing.

I think I'll probably stick with Ubuntu, but I'll keep CentOS in mind in case there turns out to be a need to go in the Redhat direction.

CentOS fdmts August 30 2009, 06:25:01 UTC

Assuming you're in the redhat, centos, fedora world:

Go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

Look in ifcfg-eth0, and so on.

Modify by hand.

To restart your network interfaces run "service network restart".

jojomojo August 30 2009, 14:14:05 UTC

Do you have any Winsock experience? Linux TCP/IP stuff works very, very similarly (and from a developer's point of view more or less identically to any other Unix)

What do you need to know about distributions specifically? People have covered RedHat already. Debian is a long-standing non-commercial Linux, which Ubuntu is kind of based on (I run Kubuntu myself, which is Ubuntu tweaked to use KDE instead of Gnome as its desktop environment)

TCP/IP Illustrated by Richard Stevens is sort of the bible of TCP/IP programming, though it may be more detailed than you need (especially the low-level stuff). I'd see if you can find it at a library or something. You can probably find a bunch of basic client/server examples online; if there's something more specific you need to know feel free to ask, I've done Linux network-y stuff in the past.

simianpower August 31 2009, 03:54:23 UTC

Not really. Not under the hood. I've used WinSock, but only following instructions to get it working again, not actually programming it.

I've got the Stevens books on my desk. Been reading up on protocols so far, but will eventually have to do implementations.

What I'm trying to do is make a thin TCP/IP application to run in a single-board embedded processor. It needs to accept messages from the host and send them to any of three other processors, and accept responses/data from those three and send them to the host machine. That's it. It's not something either Telnet or FTP are really set up to do, since it may need to send interrupts depending on the message(s). It would be very easy for someone who knew this stuff, but I'm starting from scratch.