Linux / C i need to do some C coding do i need to install Linux or can you get a windows programme to do it? if i need Linux , is there an offical free version availble???
You can code C in either windows or linux. For C you need Borland's Turbo C suite (which I have somewhere) or Visual C++ (which comes with Microsoft Visual Studio). Or you can write it under linux, the utils required to compile/write come with most distributions of it. virtually every distribution of linux is free. It's not as simple as porting between the two however, there are notable differences in the way that C is written on both platforms (for example, under Windows you'd use the WinSock API to communicate to another machine over a network, under linux there is no winsock, you'd have to send it to the hardware). If you're hellbent determined to use linux, then I'd recommend fedora core (fedora.redhat.com). If you want the Turbo C (runs in DOS) let me know. If you're a northumbria student (and in the CEIS) then you can get it from Pandon Building for nowt (incidentally I have a copy of this too )
I will use whatever but the final solution has to work on the Uni's Unix system which Linux should i go for??
You're probs best off with fedora, it's one of the easier distro's to use and comes with the tools required to compile/write C. Anything from Fedora Core 2 up should do the trick nicely, you either need to download it in CD or DVD form. You can use bit-torrent to get the images you need, the torrent files are here. Regardless of which version you pick, you need the binary image files for the x86 platform. Anything else won't work on a standard platform. Downloading the source iso images won't work either as you'll have to compile them from scratch (takes way too long).
