Free not limited to software for linux

Mandriva Linux is the operating system of choice for users keen on all things advanced.
Linux power users will welcome the advanced Web experience, enhanced hardware compatibility and expanded development options brought by Limited Edition 2005, along with significant performance gains. Firefox 1.0.2 offers the most advanced Web browsing experience, with multi-tabbed navigation, pop-up blocking, increased speed, and unmatched security.
Limited Edition also offers the RSS reader Akregator. RSS is a format used to simplify the aggregation and syndication of Web content. RSS feeds contain news and updates from websites and blogs, providing personalized access to information.
Limited Edition 2005 is built to optimize and increase performance. It has been developed with x86-64 technology in mind, which allows for the use of more powerful applications. Support for dual-core technology adds to potential performance, allowing the use of advanced new processors.
Developers and power users running demanding multimedia configurations will appreciate the additional power those features provide. Some special optimizations enhance the overall speed delivered by the system. For instance, KDE 3.3 is 10% faster, thanks to special tuning by Mandriva.
Addressing both the x86 and x86-64 architectures, Limited Edition 2005 is the only Linux system to allow the seamless installation and running of 32-bit applications on 64-bit platforms. This will allow users to benefit from all the power and performance of 64-bit technology while continuing to use vital 32-bit applications.
Developers will welcome the ability to develop 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same application on the same machine, without the need to use chroot. Finally, Limited Edition allows you to copy the contents of the DVD to the hard disk during installation, removing the need to use the DVD for subsequent software installation, and so saving even more time.
Limited Edition 2005 provides better support for removable devices such as digital cameras, CD-ROM drives and USB keys through immediate detection of devices as they are plugged in, and by allowing you to boot the installation from a USB key.
Also available is DKMS which allows kernel modules to be dynamically built for each kernel on your system in a simplified and organized fashion.
A special feature that will certainly appeal to gamers and enthusiasts is that the new release from Mandriva has support for the Xbox console, empowering users to bridge the divide between gaming and other computer activities.
Additional hardware enhancements include full support for Adaptec Host RAID controllers (RAID, SCSI, SATA) and extended recognition for the most recent flat screen monitors, including widescreen resolutions.
Main features:
The latest versions of key Linux applications
- Linux kernel 2.6.11.6
- KDE 3.3.2 (with some backports from version 3.4, including Kpdf)
- GNOME 2.8.3
- Firefox 1.0.2
- GCC 3.4.3
- The GIMP 2.2
- cdrecord 2.01.01a21 (with DVD+R dual-layer support)
- OpenOffice.org 1.1.4
- MySQL 4.1.11
Enhanced Hardware support
- Unequalled x86-64 support, including seamless installation of a 32-bit environment on the 64-bit platform, allowing developers to build 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system
- Full support for Adaptec Host RAID controllers (RAID, SCSI, SATA)
- Improved recognition of removable devices, such as digital cameras, CD-ROM drives and USB keys
- Improved support for the most recent flat screen monitors, including widescreen resolutions
- Simplified handling of drivers thanks to the integration of Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS), enabling the changing of drivers without the need to reinstall the Kernel, and the ability to use the same driver on multiple different kernel revisions
- Support for multimedia keyboards
Faster
- Up to 10% greater KDE performance thanks to compilation with the fvisibility option
- The option to copy all software packages onto the hard disk during the installation, making it unnecessary to use the DVD for subsequent software installation
Advanced Web experience
- Firefox 1.0.2 offers the most advanced Web browsing experience, with multi-tabbed navigation, pop-up blocking, increased speed, and unmatched security.
- RSS reader Akregator to get personalized access to the content of websites from all around the globe.
Enhanced mutimedia capabilities
- ndiswrapper allows for easier wireless networking configuration, thanks to the utilization of installed Windows drivers
- Mandrivas new ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) version includes multiplexing, allowing you to listen to sound from several applications at once, even if your sound card does not perform multiplexing in hardware.

GNU make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the programs source files.
Make gets its knowledge of how to build your program from a file called the makefile, which lists each of the non-source files and how to compute it from other files. When you write a program, you should write a makefile for it, so that it is possible to use Make to build and install the program.
Capabilities of Make
- Make enables the end user to build and install your package without knowing the details of how that is done -- because these details are recorded in the makefile that you supply.
- Make figures out automatically which files it needs to update, based on which source files have changed. It also automatically determines the proper order for updating files, in case one non-source file depends on another non-source file.
As a result, if you change a few source files and then run Make, it does not need to recompile all of your program. It updates only those non-source files that depend directly or indirectly on the source files that you changed.
- Make is not limited to any particular language. For each non-source file in the program, the makefile specifies the shell commands to compute it. These shell commands can run a compiler to produce an object file, the linker to produce an executable, ar to update a library, or TeX or Makeinfo to format documentation.
- Make is not limited to building a package. You can also use Make to control installing or deinstalling a package, generate tags tables for it, or anything else you want to do often enough to make it worth while writing down how to do it.
Make Rules and Targets
A rule in the makefile tells Make how to execute a series of commands in order to build a target file from source files. It also specifies a list of dependencies of the target file. This list should include all files (whether source files or other targets) which are used as inputs to the commands in the rule.
Here is what a simple rule looks like:
target: dependencies ...
commands
...
When you run Make, you can specify particular targets to update; otherwise, Make updates the first target listed in the makefile. Of course, any other target files needed as input for generating these targets must be updated first.
Make uses the makefile to figure out which target files ought to be brought up to date, and then determines which of them actually need to be updated. If a target file is newer than all of its dependencies, then it is already up to date, and it does not need to be regenerated. The other target files do need to be updated, but in the right order: each target file must be regenerated before it is used in regenerating other targets.
Advantages of GNU Make
GNU Make has many powerful features for use in makefiles, beyond what other Make versions have. It can also regenerate, use, and then delete intermediate files which need not be saved.
GNU Make also has a few simple features that are very convenient. For example, the -o file option which says ``pretend that source file file has not changed, even though it has changed. This is extremely useful when you add a new macro to a header file. Most versions of Make will assume they must therefore recompile all the source files that use the header file; but GNU Make gives you a way to avoid the recompilation, in the case where you know your change to the header file does not require it.
However, the most important difference between GNU Make and most versions of Make is that GNU Make is free software.
Enhancements:
- Major bugfixes

libstree is a generic suffix tree implementation, written in C. libstree library can handle arbitrary data structures as elements of a string. Unlike most demo implementations, it is thus not limited to simple ASCII character strings.
Suffix tree generation in libstree is highly efficient and implemented using the algorithm by Ukkonen, which means that libstree builds suffix trees in time linear to the length of the strings (assuming that string element comparisons can be done in O(1)).
libstree can handle multiple strings per suffix tree, including dynamic insertion and removal of strings. It provides various means of obtaining information about nodes in the tree, such as depth-first and breadth-first iteration, leaves iteration, and bottom-up iteration.
libstree provides implementations of longest-common-substring and longest-repeated-substring algorithms, as examples of how to build complex algorithms using the suffix tree primitives.
Installation:
The `configure shell script attempts to guess correct values for various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses those values to create a `Makefile in each directory of the package.
It may also create one or more `.h files containing system-dependent definitions. Finally, it creates a shell script `config.status that you can run in the future to recreate the current configuration, and a file `config.log containing compiler output (useful mainly for debugging `configure).
It can also use an optional file (typically called `config.cache and enabled with `--cache-file=config.cache or simply `-C) that saves the results of its tests to speed up reconfiguring. (Caching is disabled by default to prevent problems with accidental use of stale cache files.)
If you need to do unusual things to compile the package, please try to figure out how `configure could check whether to do them, and mail diffs or instructions to the address given in the `README so they can be considered for the next release.
If you are using the cache, and at some point `config.cache contains results you dont want to keep, you may remove or edit it.
The file `configure.ac (or `configure.in) is used to create `configure by a program called `autoconf. You only need `configure.ac if you want to change it or regenerate `configure using a newer version of `autoconf.
The simplest way to compile this package is:
1. `cd to the directory containing the packages source code and type `./configure to configure the package for your system. If youre using `csh on an old version of System V, you might need to type `sh ./configure instead to prevent `csh from trying to execute
`configure itself.
Running `configure takes awhile. While running, it prints some messages telling which features it is checking for.
2. Type `make to compile the package.
3. Optionally, type `make check to run any self-tests that come with the package.
4. Type `make install to install the programs and any data files and documentation.
5. You can remove the program binaries and object files from the source code directory by typing `make clean. To also remove the files that `configure created (so you can compile the package for a different kind of computer), type `make distclean.
There is also a `make maintainer-clean target, but that is intended mainly for the packages developers. If you use it, you may have to get all sorts of other programs in order to regenerate files that came with the distribution.
Enhancements:
- LCS can now be run repeatedly on a single unmodified tree without problems.
- A memory leak in lst_stree_clear() has been fixed.

ftpcluster provides a system which integrates several FTP servers into one.
ftpcluster integrates a number of individual FTP servers into a single large server. You can think of it as a network disk array with FTP as the access protocol.
Main features:
- FTP protocol
ftpcluster speaks enough FTP to upload, download, delete and rename files. You can also create, delete and rename directories.
- The cluster is working
Files can be distributed over your cluster nodes. ftpcluster knows how to handle files on your nodes.
- Replication
Files can be replicated to two or more node for fail-over situations.
- User authentication
Version 1.0.3: Users must authenticate against a local password file. Password are actually stored in cleartext.
- Filenames
Version 1.0.3: Filenames are not limited to a certain set of characters. Theres optional support for blanks and/or arbitrary characters in filenames. You can however restrict your users to usual UNIX filename conventions.
- Partial support for FTP REST command
Version 1.0.7: The cluster supports the REST command for downloads, for uploads only if the file is stored on the cluster.
- System checker
Since version 1.0.9 there are programs to check and repair cluster nodes.
Enhancements:
- Programs to check and repair the cluster were added.
- The FXP configuration documentation was started.

Proxifier project is an easy to install three tier web proxy written in PHP.
Features include the ability to remove cookies, the HTTP referer field, the HTTP user-agent field, scripts on the page, and objects, altering the user-agent string to whatever you please, and tunnelling your proxied traffic through a second proxy.
If there existed a freely public install of this script, two standard proxies could be used, one entered in the proxy settings of your browser, and one entered into the publicly installed web proxy, to create a connection being passed between three separate proxy servers before hitting the final destination.
Most web sites should be supported by this web proxy. If a site doesnt seem to be supported, please email me. Please note, however, that most AJAX applications will probably have problems with Proxifier, so dont attempt to use anything like GMail or Meebo.
DO NOT USE THIS PROXY AS OF NOW TO ACCESS ANY SENSITIVE INFORMATION, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CREDIT CARD INFORMATION, SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, SENSITIVE PASSWORDS, AND OTHER SIMILAR THINGS! Currently, SSL/TLS is supported through just entering a URL in the field. BEWARE: This does NOT secure your connection to the proxy server as of yet, only the connection from the proxy server to the web server the request is going to! This might create a false sense of security for some people, as your passwords are being passed openly without encryption through the Internet.
Enhancements:
- A major bug has been fixed where certain versions of the PCRE library would have issue with one of the regular expressions, causing many pages to not load at all.
- A bug where the base HTML tag was being parsed incorrectly has been fixed.
- Some instances of preg_match() have been replaced with other functions that were more efficient for the circumstances.

Somatic project is a generic 3D puzzle solver for soma and pentomino-like puzzles.

Somatic is a generic 3D puzzle solver for soma and pentomino-like puzzles. For an arbitrary set of pieces and a figure with not more than 64 cubes, it can check whether this figure can be built using these pieces and return one or more solutions.

It can also solve split figures that are not connected and partial figures, which do not need all pieces to be built.

Piece sets that can be solved include but are not limited to the soma cube, the somaplus set, the doublesoma set, the bedlam cube, and the pentomino set.

ZoltanPlayer is a music playing daemon. It accepts remote commands via its own mini HTTP server and can use seamlessly Audio or Data CDs. Audio CDs are played internally (optionally querying CDDB info servers) and digital songs in audio CDs are played via external players. Its not limited to CDs, as a hard disk directory can also be used.
The optimal equipment for ZoltanPlayer is a CDROM-equipped computer directly connected to an amplifier or stereo. Its not a streaming server, nor a ripper, nor a simple HTTP+HTML interface jukebox (this could be done with a CGI). ZoltanPlayer integrates the controlling of CD insertion / eject with the capability of directly playing CD Audio and spawning external player for MP3 / Ogg Vorbis / whatever song files.
Current version is 1.0.0. This software only runs on Linux and its licensed under the GPL.
Here is a list of commands for ZoltanPlayer:
mount: Mounts the CD in the drive (closing it if necessary). If its a CD Audio, it will take info about it and search the local CDDB cache; if no info for this CD is found, it will query a remote CDDB server. If its a CD-ROM, it will traverse it recursively looking for playable files and the subdirectories containing songs will be treated as groups. Anyway, the list of songs will be stored in its internal database ready for playing.
umount: Unmounts the CD, and ejects it.
xmount: A combination of the previous two. If CD is mounted, umount it, and vice-versa.
hd: Reads a directory from the hard disk (this directory must be defined in the config file to be used). It will be treated the same as a CD-ROM. This command can also be used to re-read the hard disk directory contents if it has been updated since ZoltanPlayer read it.
play: Starts playing the first song.
stop: Stops playing.
pause: Pauses / unpauses the currently playing song.
next-song: Moves to the next song and plays it.
prev-song: Move to the previous song and plays it.
goto-N: Moves to song number N and plays it.
next-group: Moves to the first song of the next group and plays it If no group is defined (as in Audio CDs), it restarts playing from the first song.
prev-group: Moves to the first song of the previous group and plays it.If no group is defined (as in Audio CDs), it restarts playing from the first song.
song-info: Returns information about the song being played in one line. This command can be used from a shell script to display the info on an LCD, a ticker or something like that.
vol-up: Pumps up the volume by 5%. Only operative if the sound card mixer is being used (see sample config file).
vol-down: Lowers the volume by 5%. Only operative if the sound card mixer is being used.
cd-info: Shows the current list of songs, and information about the current group and song being played, if any.
skip-N: disable the song number N (do not play it).
rest-N: enable the previously disabled song number N.
toggle: toggle the skip selection.
toggle-playlist: toggle the skip selection for those songs inside playlists.
shuffle: shuffle the playing order of songs.
unshuffle: get back to original sorting of songs (CD order for Audio CDs, or alphabetical ordering if song files from CDROMs or hard di
Enhancements:
- Support for CD cover images.
- First stable release.