operation system I can use

[t014y]

I'm about to take a bunch of computer science classes next semester and i would like to use a light-weight operating system that will be useful for many different types of programming languages. one that I know I will be using are C, C++, and Lua. The Lua one is just because I'm going to try and start making for addons for World of Warcraft.

I'm sorry if i put this in the wrong place.

thank you

[NeonBlack]

GD would probably be more appropriate.

People might disagree, but I say why not XP? It runs great on 0.5 GB of ram, easy to set up, you can use the mingw port of gcc and unlike linux, it has the capability of running warcraft.

[zacs7]

Linux -- pick a distro. I run Arch on all 3 of my computers (laptop, desktop and my cupboard Linux box ), and my uni runs Scientific Linux (for CS / SE students). So whatever floats your boat.

[laserlight]

Moved to Tech Board.

[cyberfish]

How many OSes are you familiar with? Are you willing to learn new ones? Since you are probably going to encounter UNIX (or UNIX-like) machines sooner or later anyways, might as well install Linux and start learning (assuming you don't already know how to use it). There is also BSD, but I think Linux is better supported for desktop tasks (but please take it as a grain of salt, as I have never tried BSD, so I cannot comment on it fairly), although the rumours say that BSD is more stable than Linux under extremely high load (high traffic servers).

Popular Linux distributions run pretty well on 128MB-256MB (32-64MB for command line) RAM and <1Ghz CPUs, that should be lightweight enough?

Dual-booting is an option, too. Eg, I keep a Windows XP installation around to play games, but do all my "serious" work on Linux. Failing that, running Linux in a virtual machine is an option, too (though probably not the other way around, if you intend to play games on Windows, as virtual machines don't have good 3D support currently).

[stevesmithx]

If you are new to Linux I would recommend Linux Mint distro which is based on Ubuntu (but unlike ubuntu has all the video and audio codecs prepackaged with it).
It can be booted from USB with persistence mode.I have it in my 2GB pendrive and it works great and very portable and handy. And if that's not enough you can download additional packages using APT.

[brewbuck]

I'm about to take a bunch of computer science classes next semester and i would like to use a light-weight operating system that will be useful for many different types of programming languages. one that I know I will be using are C, C++, and Lua. The Lua one is just because I'm going to try and start making for addons for World of Warcraft.

I'm sorry if i put this in the wrong place.

thank you

Chances are, a large fraction of your professors are going to be using Linux. As are the help desk students, and tutors. I wouldn't suggest chucking Windows out the... window, but a dual boot of Windows and a Linux distro geared toward development might not be a bad idea.