Port app from Windows to Linux

First of all, I have almost no experience in the Linux environment. With that said, I have a few questions:

I have a Windows back end server running as an NT service. This server sends an updated Access MDB file to any/all clients requesting an updated MDB file. Thus, is there an equivalent of a Windows NT service in Linux? Also, is there any way to programmatically create and update Access MDB files in Linux? If not, can you recommend another approach to creating/updating any type of database in Linux?

Also, I use the Windows registry quite extensively for storing and retrieving data. Is there a Linux equivalent the the "registry"?

The front end client is a Windows GUI that I will port to Linux. I plan to use wxWidgets for the port. Can anybody offer any suggestions, tips etc. to make life a little easier for me as I do the port?



Thanx for any assistance offered.

Bob

>>If not, can you recommend another approach to creating/updating any type of database in Linux?

PostgreSQL is a good OSS Database that ships with many linux distros. You could try that.
www.postgresql.org/

>>I plan to use wxWidgets for the port. Can anybody offer any suggestions, tips etc. to make life a little easier for me as I do the port?

Which windowing environment are you targeting? It would be a lot easier to build a GUI with something like GLADE
http://glade.gnome.org/


I don't really know anything about windows NT services so I can't really try to draw a comparison there. I'm not sure about Access db operations either.

I'll have to check out Glade. I originally was going to start with KDE but I just can't get it running on my P2 box with a Debian distro. So, I installed XFCE4 which runs fine. I was under the impression that most Linux distros came with KDE and gnome. I just don't understand why KDE won't fire up.

But anyway, a Window NT service allows a background application to run 24/7 whether or not someone is logged into the system. Normally, this service would not have any interaction with the desktop.

I guess I'll probably have to use a PostgreSQL database for my original "registry" data.

Also, my app has be run on as many "flavors" of Unix as possible. So, I have to choose a database and desktop environment that is common to most Linux distros. As I said before, it's my impression that KDE and gnome are common to most distros. Thus Glade looks promising.

Thanx

according to one of wxwidgets development team, wxwidgets is a code / build once, run anywhere.

so using wxwidgets would automatically port your app to all 30 odd operating systems wxwidgets supports.

I've been fighting debian for the last 13 hours to get a gui installed myself, for some reason it keeps throwing errors.

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Thus, is there an equivalent of a Windows NT service in Linux?

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Daemon

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I've been fighting debian for the last 13 hours to get a gui installed myself, for some reason it keeps throwing errors

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I know the feeling. This is my first Linux install on an old P2 box. Fortunately, everything went smooth except the GUI desktop.

I'm still having problems with it. But I think its user problems because I have almost no Linux experience.

BTW, can you recommend a good basic text editor for Linux? Something that can be learned in about 5 minutes. Just basic new, open and save text files. I'm not particularly thrilled about using vi or Emacs. Bottom line, is I want to start writing code ASAP not learn about the functionality of a text editor.

Also, looks like a daemon is the answer to my back end service.

Thanx

Bob

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Originally Posted by BobS0327

BTW, can you recommend a good basic text editor for Linux? Something that can be learned in about 5 minutes. Just basic new, open and save text files.

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I'd suggest nano; You'll probably want to run it with the "-w" command line switch, as this disables auto-wrap, which you generally don't want enabled when programming.

Code:

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> man nano

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should get you enough information to get started.

Thanx for all the info. It's been a great help.

If your graphical, and have any luck installing KDE eventually, give Kate a try. Its a nice editor.

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Originally Posted by Jaqui

according to one of wxwidgets development team, wxwidgets is a code / build once, run anywhere.

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I was looking into wxWidgets for a while, and the above isn't true. To build once run anywhere you need a RTE to interpret, and wxWidgets doesn't have a RTE, you have to compile your application on each platform you want it to run on. You will have seperate binaries for each. Their *nix ones generally run on almost all flavors of *nix (none of my friends had any issues running my apps).

Wraithan,

I don't doubt that the person that told me that wasn't clear, since his comment was:
" Build once, run anywhere"

To me, build is compile, to him it seems to be code.

how can a *x app run on a windows os, the binary format is completely different, so it's an impossibility to compile an executable once and run it on any os, without sucking resources into an rte.

for doing cross platform development, it's probably one of the easiest widget sets available to work with.

I'd be a real "happy camper" if wxWidgets works without any major problems on all Linux distros and gui desktops available.

The only downside from my perspective is that I'll have to convert my existing C code into C++ code to keep the Linux/wxWidgets project consistent. IMO, mixing C and C++ is just downright ugly.

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Originally Posted by BobS0327

The only downside from my perspective is that I'll have to convert my existing C code into C++ code to keep the Linux/wxWidgets project consistent. IMO, mixing C and C++ is just downright ugly.

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Not just ugly, it can create conflicts during the build process, since the compile is working differently with each language. Specially if you call the C++ compiler directly instead of using the automatic language detection in the gcc call.
[ use gcc, and it will determin which compiler is required for which bit of code, use g++ and the c code could choke the compiler. ]