i'm a real novice and have very little knowledge regarding Ubuntu Linux. I have a Live CD Ubuntu 8.04LTS from my son and tried it on my office computer and also install ubuntu from this live CD on my Home computer side by side with Windows XP SP II. I've written very small programs with MS visual base using Visual Studio 2005 for my few jobs which needs saving data to Access Database, searching, sorting, reporting of some of my wok data. Now i've install Wine on my home computer and now trying to install visual Basic 6.0 on wine and to move some of those programs and run in wine. I'd like to know whether it is possible and also i'd like to know whether such visual environment for ubuntu. I have some limited and few knowledge of C,C++ and java. Somebody pls guide me. Thanks in anticipation.

There is Eclipse with is very trendy for java developpement. It can be used for C and C++ as well.
http://www.eclipse.org/
There is also netbeans from SUN written in java for java, and therefore you can run the same instance of it on Windows and linux:
http://www.netbeans.org/
There are seleral thousands others (such as visualage, and stuff) but Eclipse seems to be used a lot for its ease of use and freeness.
if you are willing to learn a lot of stuff and be more productive, there is emacs. It has a long learning curve but is by far the most scalable and advanced IDE on all platform of all time and probably for the several centuries to come. vim is also a good tool with a faster learning curve and lighter than emacs but still very different from Visual studio. With Eclipse you will feel more at home if you are used to Visual Studio. It is just a little more advanced and scalable than visual studio but not too much.

now i'm trying to download eclipse from site you've have shown in yr guide.Since the files to be downloaded one for Java and one for C/C++, it may takes time coz speed of my connection is often too slow. I'll will request further guidance after my download. By the way, on the download page it says Java 5 JRE is needed. Will it be possible to incorporated this Run Time E.
Thanks very much for yr guidance, Agrouf. Will Come to this thread again.

I think it support php too

Wait a minute.
You are using ubuntu right?
If so, then you should not bother about downloading and installing the stuff like that. There is apt-get which is very handy when you know it.
Just type this command:
sudo apt-get install eclipse
And bang! everything is installed and configured right for your system. It will be managed by the system (kept up to date and tracked) automatically.
I advise you read this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticHowto

Hi i'm still in my office and i start up Ubuntu from Live CD and go to Terminal and from prompt i enter sudo apt-get install eclipse.These are replies to it.
Reading package lists ... Done
Building dependencies tree
Reading state information ... Done
E : Couldn't find package eclipse

I've been on line while i perform this operation. Can you instruct me what i missed?

If your network connection is set up correctly I think both NetBeans & Eclipse can be installed that way.

Try $ sudo apt-get update
then try,
sudo apt-get install netbeans

Note: But according to your original post, you might want to consider these.

1. You might be able to run Visual Studio with Wine as you said
2. You might not be able to get some of your programs that way, most probably the ones with Access databases. MS Access is not available natively on Linux. (YMMV)
3. If you are familiar with .NET development you'd probably want to look at Mono with MonoDevelop
4. NetBeans is an IDE for Java and Ruby and other things. While Eclipse also supports Java C/C++ among a lot of other things. Look and feel and work flows in the two IDEs differ. These are full scale industry strength IDEs.
5. There are other lightweight IDE/editors for Linux. Eg: Geany, Anjuta, KDevelop (for C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc.), PIDA and Eric (Python). Even the default GNOME Text Editor, gedit can be used much like an IDE.
6. Gambas is a Basic (Basic language) IDE, much similar to Visual Basic. Perhaps you might want to try this too.

Most, if not all of these are available in your package repositories. Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager to browse your software list.

Good luck.

Basically, you should install ubuntu on your hard drive first, unless you have a lot of ram and are ready to do the same thing everyday, or you are willing to go through some complicated steps. Indeed, whatever you install while running the live CD will install in RAM and eclipse is not small! If you want to install to your hard drive but not install ubuntu, you can but you will have to setup your system to use a partition on your hard disk with unionfs and stuff and it's not that simple. If you are willing to install ubuntu on the hard drive, believe me, it is a lot easier to use eclipse.
Anyway, if you REALLY want to install in RAM (it will be gone when you turn off the computer and you better have a lot of it), you should update your program database as indicated in the preceding post and in the link I provided with synaptics or via the command line with sudo apt-get update.
If you are in your office and can't install anything to the hard drive, you can alternatively use a usb key and boot from it, which is much better than a live CD because it is persistant.
Another alternative is to use a live DVD with eclipse already burnt on it. You can make your own Ubuntu spin, or you can use another distro like knoppix which has it if my memory is correct.

Hi to all, Thank you very much for yr kind advice. Although my home computer has Ubuntu, it doesn't have internet connection and my office computer has internet connection but it is Windows XP. To understand our situation, believe it or not, we have only two ISPs to go through to internet and to have a connection is a very fortunate event. So i've now downloaded two packages from eclipse site which are -gtk.tar files. i copied it to my ubuntu box and gave command
tar -xjvf ~/myDownLoads/(the C/C++ .gtk.tar file)
and the return error is
bzip2 (stdin) is not a bzip2file
tar : child returned status 2
tar : error exit delayed from previous errors.

What should i do? Help me please!!! By the way, on the downloading page it mentioned that Java5 JRE is needed for eclipse.
Thanking in advance

There's no such thing as a .gtk.tar files in common usage. Perhaps you are talking about a .tar.gz file? I just checked Eclipse download page and see the file name ends with -gtk.tar.gz If this is the case see below for the command to extract the gzip'ed tar archives.

To extract tar type archives use the flag depending on the archive type:
$ tar xvf file.tar (for tar archives)
$ tar xzvf file.tar.gz (for gziped tar archives)
$ tar xjvf file.tar.bz2 (for bzip2'ed tar archives)

And yes, Eclipse and NetBeans both require Java. Actually their main purpose is Java development (but support other things too,... like C, C++, Ruby, Python). If this doesn't suite you see my above post for more options.

Thank you for all ur efforts for guiding me. Now i have another problem again with java5-jre.From the terminal i try sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin sun-java5-fonts but i got errors cannot fetch archive.ubuntu.com etc. May be i'm using Ubuntu 8.04LTS Live CD and so i switched to my Windows vista and from google i found and download sun-java5-jre_1.5.0-15-0ubuntu1_all.deb to my usb stick and transfer to my ubuntu /home/ubuntu/download folder. then i give command. From this directory i ran sudo dpkg -i *.deb and after some replies on terminal there is a blue screen box on terminal for disclaimer with heading of configuration for jre. there's only a prompt like words <Ok> at the end and i pressed enter without any outcome. i try other things and i found when i rightclick on the disclaimer text, there is a popup menu with input methods option showing some methods type with system being selected. I try to change to some methods without any improvement. Pls advised me what to do. By the way, last 4 months on so, i try to download an application from sun.java and at that time there's a reply that our isp ip is ban by sun due to some reasons. is that the answer to this problem or else pls advise me to proceed with my installation. Thanking you in advance!!!

try to use the right arrow on the keyboard to select the 'OK' button and then press enter. If that fails, try the 'Tab' button, and down arrow.

Thank you very much Agrouf.i boot up my office computer which has internet access with Ubuntu 8.04LTS live CD and try to install sun-java5-jre both from synaptic and from command line after updating the system-software sources with both all the options being checked for Ubuntu and installing java-common from synaptic.sun-java5-jre installation gives errors as follows:
Error : could not find libjava.so
could not find Java2 RunTime Environment
dpkg : error processing sun-java5-bin (--configure)
sub process post-installation script returned error exit status 2
dpkg : dependency problems prevent configuration of sun-java5-jre
sun-java5-jre depends on sun-java5-bin(=1.5.0-15-0ubuntu1)|1a32-sun-java5-bin(=1.5.0-15-0ubuntu1); however :
package sun-java5-bin is not configured yet
package ia32-sun-java5-bin is not installed
dpkg : error processing sun-java5-jre (--configure)
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing Triggers for libc6...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Errors were encountered while processing
sun-java5-bin
sun-java5-jre
E: sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned error code (1)

I try to find ia32-sun-java5-bin on google and found http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/ia32-sun-java5.bin with download for sun-java5_1.5.0-15.orig.tar.gz site.
I try to find for libjava.so but and i can not understand the returns site.Is it a package or else?
i have not find java2 Runtime Environment yet.Try later.
I would be much appreciated for kind guidance and instruction.

Did you test to have java in synaptic?

i've checked my synaptic and found these packages.
javacc
javacc-doc
java-common
java-gcj-compat
java-gcj-compat-dev
java-gcj-compat-headless

From terminal i typed java -version and get these reply.
program java can be found in following programs.
java-gcj-compat-headless
openjdk-6-jre-headless
r2rel.4
kaffe
cacao
gij-4.1
jamvm
gij-4.2
sablevm
try : sudo apt-get install <selected package>
bash : java : command not found.
That all i know what to do since im in touch with ubuntu only 20days ago. Thanks