This page lists the not so obvious tools I like to have in my development environment. This is probably not complete but represents an attempt to capture information about what I install and/or configure when confronted with a new GNU/Linux development machine. This list focuses on tools which are not normally part of the distribution or require special configuration before I used them. So this does not include the normal complement of compilers, debuggers, etc. that come with a GNU/Linux distribution.

CVS

CVS is a source code control system that supports distributed development. It is normally included in GNU/Linux installations. The primary site for it is http://www.cvshome.org. I like to add the following components:

cvsweb is a CGI script that lets you browse a repository.

cvsweb is great but adding CVSgraph makes is even nicer. CVSgraph uses an Apache PHP scripting.

If you are running cvs pserver, then cvsadmin is a very handy server side program to administer users of a CVS repository.

GNATS

GNATS is a problem tracking system.

GNATS is the GNU problem tracking system. Some things that tend to be easy to forget when setting this up are getting the file /etc/gnatsdb.conf right and remembering to add queue-pr to the crontab for the gnats user.

GNATSweb is the web interface to gnats. On all the machines I have installed this on, it has required updating Perl from CPAN.

VNC

Virtural Network Console (VNC) is an alternative to XTerminals that also has some support for remote control of Windows PCs.

TightVNC is a project to add low-bandwidth optimizations to VNC and (more important to me) they are nice enough to provide RPMs for VNC with their optimizations at their SourceForge site.

Setting VNC on Linux is a great aid to setting VNC up on a Linux box. With these instructions, one can have vncserver running in a matter of minutes on a RedHat 7.2 box.

IDEs

I would like to get information on IDEs that are nice and support both native and RTEMS development. Convince me I want to use one.:)

Miscellaneous

Alien is a cool program to convert RPMs into alternate formats such as tarballs and Debian packages. There is a link on that site to a nice user who provides RPMs for Alien and the extra things it needs to do Debian.