Software that I use

Description

Link

A free operating system initially created by Linus Torvalds and now used and developed by thousands of people around the world. It runs on pretty much anything from an old 386 PC, to handheld computers, to mainframes. Linux is based around the concepts of the Unix operating system originally developed at Bell Labs back in the mid 1970's.

Linux

One of the first programs out of the GNU project. The GNU Compiler Collection is a set of compilers for compiling C, C++, Java and a few other languages into assembly language for almost every microprocessor that has been produced. GCC and the GNU project predate most of the other open source projects by a long, long way.

GCC

This displays and interprets Postscript and PDF document files. These file formats are probably the best way of sending a document from one person to another. They are standardised, and whether your recipient is on MS-Windows, any Unix verient, Mac or whatever they can read them. Ghostscript can also create PDF files from your documents. In addition Ghostscript can be used to turn a cheap laser printer or ink jet printer (like my BJ200) into one that can print postscript documents.

Ghostscript

OpenOffice is a full office suite containing word processor, spreadsheet, charting app and other bits and bobs. It is quite powerful and these days does a reasonable job of working with other office suits. The latest version also works pretty well for editing web pages.

OpenOffice

The X Window System to give its full name, deals with all the details of drawing and interacting with the user under many Unix varients. The version used by myself and most Linux users is that produced by the XFree86 organisation.

X and XFree

While X deals with the details of displaying and interacting with the user it doesn't do much for style or ease of use. The GNOME project mostly runs on top of X and provides a range of easy to use applications and makes X much easier to use, and just as importantly it makes it easier for programmers to write applications that are easy to use and are nice. The Gnumeric spreadsheet and Gnucash applications are especially good.

GNOME

KDE is similar to GNOME in concept but quite different in the implementation; I mainly use KDE these days. It contains an extremly capable web browser called Konqueror.

KDE

SWIG (aka The Simple Wrapper and Interface Generator) is a program which connects C or C++ programs with scripting languages such as TCL and Perl. I find it very useful since it lets me concentrate on making the C code do what I want the application to do and let me throw a simple scripting mechanism and GUI on top of it.

SWIG

Fetchmail gets mail from a POP, IMAP or pretty much any other type of mail server and sticks it on your machine in a way that you can read it.

Fetchmail

vi is a text editor; nothing more, nothing less. Its syntax is odd, it isn't very user friendly; but its damn powerful and I like it! It is also very small and found on pretty much every Unix system. vi has been about for years and there are loads of versions of editors which work in ways similar to the original vi. I use the vim varient

vi

Mutt is a mail reader; it is text based and has a simple menu based user interface. It is simple to use, fast and powerful.

Mutt

Tcl is a scripting language that is dead easy to learn and very powerful. Tk is a graphical toolkit which was designed to go with Tcl (but is also now available with Perl and a few other languages). The combination is great for throwing together graphical front ends to other programs or for doing simple control of stuff. Tcl/Tk can do in one line what might take a page of code in C or C++ for some tasks.

Tcl/Tk

GRUB is a boot loader that can load Linux and most other operating systems on x86 PCs. It is VERY flexible, and it lets you load kernels from anywhere on your disc at boot time without having to tell it about them previously.

GRUB