Back to the "roots"

Java is a nice language, but sometimes...
Windows XP is, hum... not that much of a good OS for development...
Therefore I though it would be a good idea for me to go back to the "roots", and return to another world where I used to live in the past.

It started one week ago, when I finally re-installed the latest Ubuntu. Wow, what a change! Using Wubi I got it to work in minutes, without going via the painful disk partitioning. Super!
It is kind of fast, even it is using a NTFS file as virtual disk.
My PC starts to be a bit old, but still, nice to see everything works without having to spend hours goggling and vi'ing!

Having the OS for my experiments, I now had to find out what I would use for development. My first reflex was to get back this fantastic IDE that is IntelliJ IDEA. Bad idea, I am already wondering why I did not throw away my work laptop PC - a much more recent PC, faster... There is no comparison: Windows XP + Anti-virus + all the nice IT managed software against an old PC with Linux... guess what is the fastest.

But going back to the roots is not only about changing my development OS. It is also about changing the language. I did not practice C/C++ for too long and Java is nice, but, but... It is too easy to forget how things are underneath.
Here I come IntelliJ, trying a C++ plug-in, hopping I could keep my habits... Uh uh, let's forget that. It is simply not working.

Small reflexion, finally, do I need an IDE? I don't want to depend only on an IDE to build my experiment. I want makefiles! May be I am crazy, but no, in fact, I don't like too much magic. I like to know how things work and be able to control what is going on. So I need an IDE that can work with makefiles too, eventually use or generate them.

After some quick search and tests, I tried two things: Anjuta and CodeBlocks.
My (quick) conclusion was simple: Anjuta was too complex for me (but looked very nice since it integrates all this dirty automake magic things and tons of features), and CodeBlocks seems to be just what I need; it gives me the impression I can easily build my makefile from it...

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