Free from abc software for linux

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with the steps necessary to build your own custom Linux system.
There are a lot of reasons why somebody would want to install an LFS system. The question most people raise is "why go through all the hassle of manually installing a Linux system from scratch when you can just download an existing distribution?". That is a valid question which I hope to answer for you.
The most important reason for LFSs existence is teaching people how a Linux system works internally. Building an LFS system teaches you about all that makes Linux tick, how things work together, and depend on each other. And most importantly, how to customize it to your own taste and needs.
One of the key benefits of LFS is that you are in control over your system without having to rely on somebody elses Linux implementation. You are in the drivers seat now and are able to dictate every single thing such as the directory layout and boot script setup. You will also know exactly where, why and how programs are installed.
Another benefit of LFS is that you can create a very compact Linux system. When you install a regular distribution, you end up installing a lot of programs you probably would never use. Theyre just sitting there taking up (precious) disk space. Its not hard to get an LFS system installed under 100 MB. Does that still sound like a lot? A few of us have been working on creating a very small embedded LFS system. We installed a system that was just enough to run the Apache web server; total disk space usage was aproximately 8 MB. With further stripping, that can be brought down to 5 MB or less. Try that with a regular distribution.
If we were to compare a Linux distribution with a hamburger you buy at a supermarket or fast-food restaurant, you would end up eating it without knowing precisely what it is you are eating, whereas LFS gives you the ingredients to make a hamburger. This allows you to carefully inspect it, remove unwanted ingredients, and at the same time allow you to add ingredients to enhance the flavour of your hamburger. When you are satisfied with the ingredients, you go on to the next part of putting it together. You now have the chance to make it just the way you like it: broil it, bake it, deep-fry it, barbeque it, or eat it raw.
Another analogy that we can use is that of comparing LFS with a finished house. LFS will give you the skeleton of a house, but its up to you to install plumbing, electrical outlets, kitchen, bathtub, wallpaper, etc.
Another advantage of a custom built Linux system is added security. You will compile the entire system from source, thus allowing you to audit everything, if you wish to do so, and apply all the security patches you want or need to apply. You dont have to wait for somebody else to provide a new binary package that fixes a security hole. Besides, you have no guarantee that the new package actually fixes the problem (adequately). You never truly know whether a security hole is fixed or not unless you do it yourself.
Enhancements:
- The LFS LiveCD Team is proud to announce the release of the x86-6.2-3 version of LFS LiveCD. This version is built using LFS 6.2 and many Beyond Linux From Scratch packages from the Subversion branch. Source packages for LFS 6.2, and the LFS book itself, are included on the live CD. The CD is also suitable as a host for building x86 and x86_64 Cross LFS systems. Other features and bugfixes: the CD supports hibernation; the CD file system can be written to; the CD contains a visually pleasing and easy-to-use window manager, XFce...

Plan 9 From User Space is a port of the bulk of the Plan 9 software build environment to Unix.
While the libraries make an attempt to play nice with the rest of the system (by using the Unix rules for printf verbs and Unix system headers, for example), this port tries to reproduce the Plan 9 build environment as faithfully as possible, providing u.h and libc.h, and blithely redefining tokens such as open, dup, and accept in order to provide implementations that better mimic the Plan 9 semantics.
The result is a more complicated and less Unix-friendly environment, but Plan 9 programs can typically be compiled with little or no changes.
Most obviously, plan9port derives from Plan 9 from Bell Labs and would not exist without the work of the Plan 9 team over the past many years.
Rob Pike suggested the original X11 port of libdraw years ago, as part of drawterm, and strongly encouraged the Mac OS X work. He has also been a consistent source of good ideas to hide the ugliness of modern Unix.
William Josephson handled troff(1) (with Taj Khattra) and many of the supporting programs. He also inspired the thread library clean-up and has ported a handful of applications.
Andrey Mirtchovski and Axel Belinfante have done significant work dealing with X11 corner cases and fine-tuning rio(1). Axel never tires of finding bugs in the SunOS port.
Latchesar Ionkov has contributed many fixes to tricky bugs, and got factotum(4) up and running.
Many other people have provided help, ported programs, written bug reports, sent useful patches, and gotten plan9port running on new systems.
Bigelow & Holmes, Inc. created the screen fonts in the luc, lucm, lucsans, and pelm directories and granted permission to redistribute them with plan9port.
Enhancements:
- A FUSE-related bug was fixed. See http://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2006-July/048531.html

IABC is a free music notation program based on the ABC programming language. It uses the ABC music notation language to produce high-quality graphical notation or MIDI output. The music notation and the ABC notation can be updated in real-time, making the construction of tunes using the ABC language hassle-free (or at least hassle-resistant).
The goal of iabc is to incorporate the functionality of a wide variety of filter tools, such as abc2ps or abc2midi, into one easy-to-use application. My goal was to not make it the front end (or worse, back end) of any other program, no matter how useful. Nothing against the text-based tools, but the technology has evolved to a point that it should be possible to provide free music software the is both graphical and robust.
Main features:
- Graphical Display of music
- Music printing
- MIDI output
- Multi-voice abc
- Cut/paste/undo/transpose edit functions

abcpp is a simple yet powerful preprocessor designed for, but not limited to, ABC music files. One of my hobbies is music: I play flute, recorder, whistle and clarinet, and I sing as a tenor in a choir. I find that the ABC music notation language is a wonderful tool to typeset sheet music. ABC is one of the best designed, easy to use, well-thought out, and nicely implemented notation formats Ive ever seen: IMHO, it surpasses other good notation languages like GNU Lilypond or MusiXTeX. (Philips Music Writer is a serious contender though.) You can write music in a very simple ASCII format and convert it to MIDI, or typeset it to make professional-looking scores.

The only serious problem with ABC is that it was originally designed for melody, not for harmony. In simple words, this means that you can only write music for a single instrument or voice. This is an example of what ABC can do; it sounds like this. Although it works beautifully for simple tunes and folk music, it can be not enough for Western classical music.

Some ABC applications implement unofficial extensions to the ABC language that make it possible to write polyphonic music. The purpose of the ABC Plus project is to provide software and documentation for this extended ABC. Here is an example of classical music written in ABC Plus; it sounds like this.

All RPMs available from this site were built on a Mandriva 2006 GNU/Linux machine.

Argtable is an ANSI C library for parsing GNU style command line arguments, as in "foo -abc -o myfile --help --count=7".
Argtable library enables a programs command line syntax to be defined in the source code as an array of argtable structs. The command line is then parsed according to that specification, and the resulting values are returned in those same structs where they are accessible to the main program.
The default parsing, validation, and error reporting routines may be replaced by user-defined callbacks if desired, and new argtable data types may be created to parse user-defined argument types.
The parsing itself is done using GNU getopt and so is 100% GNU compatible.
Enhancements:
- This release adds some additional foolproofing in the arg_xxxn() constructor functions.
- It also fixes a bug in arg_parsearg() that is specific to TI DSP platforms, and a bug in the arg_dbl() constructor that is specific to Solaris platforms.