[aclug-L] Re: Linux open source projects

[Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jon's general advice below is good, but the projects he mentions may not
be the best. There is a huge amount of work that needs to be done based
on GTK+, particularly in the Gnome project. I imagine you could build a
whole career just in that nook. Take a good look at:

  http://developer.gnome.org/

Starting with "Getting Involved". You may want to start out by following
a small area, such as games or even screen savers. (Awesome screensavers
under Gnome, including at least one which hangs my system.) Sign up for
a mailing list or two, and just lurk to try to get a feel for what's
going on, who's doin what, etc. (You may find people on the list who're
quite happy to help you, but most folks on these lists are very busy,
up to their necks in mail as it is, and are only concerned with getting
their work done. If you jump in as an "absolute beginner", someone's
going to more/less rudely tell you to go do your homework first.) Try
to reproduce problems as they are reported, and debug them. (Learn the
debugging tools well.)

Jonathan Hall wrote:
> 
> I'd say that in my experience, the best way to get started is by writing
> your own program.  Just create your own one-man project to get started.
> Perhaps reinvent the wheel--write an IRC client or an e-mail program or
> something fairly simple.  Then... start by adding your own features to an
> existing program.  Add color to ircII or add random signature support to
> pine, etc.
> 
> Once you've done that sort of stuff for a while, you'll have a better feel
> for what's involved in programming an entire project, and what it's like to
> work with other people's source code.  Then, find a project you're
> interested in helping with, and join their development team.
> 
> That's my 2 cents...
> 
> On Wed, Dec 08, 1999 at 05:44:11PM -0600, Patrick R. Klee wrote:
> > Hello fellow ACLUG members,
> >     I am currently learning C and C++, along with GTK+ (Gimp Toolkit).
> > I was wondering, where I can find a project to join, and get recognized
> > as a Linux programmer.  I checked out http://www.linuxlinks.com and all
> > of the sites were for advanced level programmers.  I have a basic
> > knowledge of C++, but want to learn C.  I am getting some books for
> > Christmas, hopefully this will help a lot.  But, I feel if I look at
> > some code, I can learn from the code, if of course, they use heavy
> > commenting.  :-)
> >
> > Patrick
> >

-- 
/*
 *  Tom Hull * thull@xxxxxxxxxxx * http://www.ocston.org/~thull/
 */