Tutorial: Practical makefiles, by example

I know a lot of programmers, who are afraid of makefiles. Most of them come from a windows background, and when they migrate to GNU/Linux or MacOS X they naturally gravitate towards clunky IDEs to manage their build process. Others, fearing that makefiles are going to be too complex to manage manually, try to use even clunkier makefile (or project file) generators like cmake.

While none of the above solutions is without some merit in particular cases, I strongly believe that there’s no faster and simpler way to build your project, than writing a small makefile. And in order to dispel the fear, I decided to write a tutorial about how to write simple, practical makefiles, for your programs.

The article is too big and too … structured, for my idea of what a blog post should be, so I’m hosting it on my web site along with some of my previous articles instead.

So anyway here it is, let me know if you find it useful: Practical makefiles, by example.
Feel free to use the comments section in this post for any feedback, or send me an email if you prefer.

Btw, I used reStructuredText, and the docutils translators for this. So there’s also a PDF version, produced through the rst2latex translator. It’s not as good as it could have been if I wrote it directly in LaTeX, but I suppose it’s serviceable if you prefer a printable off-line version.

Kernel Development from Scratch

I’ve started a series of articles for the new Greek magazine: Linux Inside. The articles aim to introduce the reader to kernel development, by starting from scratch and building up a small working kernel.

The first issue of Linux Inside, which should be available by now, includes the first part of the series which covers setting up the development tools for compiling and running the kernel both on the real machine and in a simulator, bootstrapping with multiboot boot loaders, and text output by driving the VGA in text mode.

For obvious reasons the full source code supplementing each article could not fit in the pages of the magazine, only the most relevant snippets are included. So make sure to follow the URL at the start of the article to download the full source code and have it handy while you read. The source code for the first article can be found here.

So go grab a copy of the Linux Inside magazine and let me know what you think. Each article will also contain exercises for the readers, so have a go at them and send me your code! I’ll try to include it in the next issue.

Oh and of course each article will be released under a free license (I’m thinking either GNU FDL or CC BY-SA) when each issue goes out of circulation.

edit: Just made a website for the series.

Introductory OpenGL tutorials continued

Just a short notice, the second part of my “introduction to 3D graphics with OpenGL” series should be available as we speak. This time, we’ll perform the full set of transformations that we described while discussing the rendering pipeline in the previous issue. We’ll use the matrix stack to separate the model from the view parts of the modelview matrix, and render multiple objects properly. And finally we’re going to explain the mathematical model of shading and illumination, and we’ll apply lighting to our object in order to increase the realism of our simple 3D environment tremendously.

So, go and grab a copy of the november-december issue of the greek linux format magazine, and let me know what you think. As always I look forward to your comments, suggestions, corrections, etc.

By the way, due to popular demand, I will upload the first tutorial of the series in a couple of weeks, after the previous issue of linux format goes out of circulation.

Introductory OpenGL tutorials

I recently started writing a series of introductory tutorials about graphics programming with OpenGL, for the greek linux format magazine.

The articles are written for the complete begginer, who hasn’t had any previous exposure to graphics programming. However, familiarity with the C programming language is definitely required.

What I’m aiming for, is to thoroughly explain the underlying theory, in order to provide a stepping stone for someone who would like to eventually delve deeper into graphics algorithms, rather than just present raw examples for doing this and that with OpenGL.

In any case, the first article of the series will be published in the september-october issue of the greek linux format magazine, which should be available during the next few days. Any feedback, is greatly appreciated.