Development environment options

What are the environment options for Cuda toolkit these days+

I don’t want to buy Visual Studio, because the cheapest version around here is 2010 professional, and it
costs 1559,90 €. A bit high for a hobby? I understand that it won’t work with VS express editions?
(In USD the price would be $2,071.55.) Soon it will be 2012 that doesn’t run on Vista and I’d need a new operating system too.

(Even in Amazon it’s expensive: http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Studio-2010-Professional-Version/dp/B0038KTO8S)

The officially supported Linux versions are more or less obsolete, and installing to, say, Ubuntu 12.4 seem to need some “excercise movements”. I understand that with newer releases it’s even harder.

Is it the bytecode interpreter that causes this trouble?

You can use the free trial version of Visual Studio 2010 for 60 days (download from microsoft).

At that point you can either get your hands on a valid key (not that hard, Google it), or get the $200-300 student version. If you put some effort into it you can get a nice VS setup for little to no cost.

I believe that express versions of VS will work fine, other than the 64 bit aspect.

Also I should note (and this is where I get my copies of Visual Studio) that Microsoft has a website called http://www.dreamspark.com that you can download vs 2010, 2012, 2013, even, and other Microsoft products as long as you (or someone that’s willing to do you the favor) can verify as a student on that site (academic e-mail or ISIC card).

Thanks for the answers.

I wonder if finnish university studentship is fine?

Maybe I should give the 2010 express version a try. Are special tricks needed?

The machine is some years old and has 32-bit Vista even if the processor is 3-core phenom.
The video card is not very hot either (GeForce 9300 GE), but should support cuda.
It’s probably enough for beginner’s little experiments.

As long as your school is listed on the Microsoft Academic Verification Engine after you create an account on dreamspark, you should be able to get the full versions of Visual Studio just fine. They just want to be able to verify your school’s primary .edu e-mail. I see many universities in Finland come up on the list if you look under your country.

Even better news: CUDA 5.5 is out and it supports
Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 (both 32- and 64-bit). Officially!

Am I lucky or am I luckier still …?

Funny, I didn’t completely read your first post, otherwise I would’ve told you that setting up CUDA 5.0 isn’t that hard on Ubuntu, even if it’s not supported. I haven’t tried to set up CUDA 5.5 on Ubuntu yet, but I suspect it would be straightforward.

The reason for the ‘incompatibility’ is that the newer GCC compilers on later Ubuntu versions have problems compiling some of the source code of the older 5.0 and 4.2 CUDA versions. This is easily fixed downloading a previous version of GCC and using update-alternatives to set the older version ass the default – one could always switch back easily to the newer compiler if need be. Presumably that wouldn’t be needed under the supported versions with the new CUDA 5.5.