please help me choose an IDE for programming on linux OS. My programming experience is with MS VBasic 6 on windows(Beginnger LEVEL) i have done some research, and i have concluded on using either NETBEANS WITH JAVA SDK BUNDLE or KDEVELOP(can i use KDEVELOP to develop for GNOME) which is better for me, my goal is developing open source software and contributing to linux community. THanks

Hmmm... Perhaps you mean you wish to contribute to the free software or open source communities? You might get away with relying entirely on an IDE if you're only programming in Java but for general work you'll need to know the tools: make, automake, autoconf, gcc, gdb etc. Even powerful IDEs like Kdevelop and Anjuta are really just gui front ends to these tools and ironically, the bigger the project and the more likely it is you'd want to use an IDE, the more likely it is you'll need to understand the basic tools when the IDE gets it wrong or cannot do what you want it to do. You may well wish to use tools such as Glade and QT's Designer for gui design and Kdevelop or Anjuta or Emacs for convenience's sake, but you really should start by familiarising yourself with the fundamental principles and building blocks of software development in *nix. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_toc.html http://www.informit.com/content/downloads/perens/0130091154.pdf http://www.network-theory.co.uk/ http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook.html

if i develop using JAVA SDK can i publish the software using GPL. because SUN's JAVA SDK is not open source by the way thanks for the links, very helpful

Sun's Java implementation is itself not open source either and it's certainly not GPL'd but that doesn't matter because you are not modifying and redistributing any part of the Java SDK or proprietary class libraries themselves, only your own creations written in the Java language. Unless there is some bizarre restriction in the SDK license that I've not heard of before, you are quite safe and there is plenty of other GPL'd Java software around anyway.

Thanks once again. You were very helpful. i have started reading The Art of Unix Programming. Very great book.