GNU Project
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From http://www.gnu.org/:
- The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop the GNU operating system, a complete Unix-like operating system which is free software—software which respects your freedom. Unix-like operating systems are built from a software collection of applications, libraries, and developer tools—plus a program to allocate resources and talk to the hardware, known as a kernel. [...] The combination of GNU and Linux is the GNU/Linux operating system, now used by millions and sometimes incorrectly called simply “Linux”. The name “GNU” is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not Unix!”
The aim of the GNU Project is to produce a totally free operating system. While the GNU kernel has not reached a stable version, the project has resulted in the creation of many tools that power most Unix-like operating systems. Arch Linux is such a system, using GNU software like the GRUB bootloader, Bash shell, and numerous other utilities and libraries.
Contents
The Base System
At the end of the installation process, an Arch system is nothing more than the Linux Kernel, the GNU toolchain, and a few command line tools. The minimal install normally contains the entire base group.
Kernel
While Hurd, the GNU Kernel, is under active development, there is not yet a stable version. For this reason Arch and most other GNU based systems use the Linux Kernel. The Arch Hurd Project aims to port Arch Linux to the Hurd kernel.
Software Collection
- GRUB — GRUB is the bootloader from the GNU project.
- glibc — glibc is GNU's implementation of the C library. Despite its name, it also supports C++ and indirectly other languages. It defines the system calls and other basic facilities such as open, malloc, printf, exit.
- binutils — It is a collection of binary tools.
- bash — It is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell (ksh) and C shell (csh).
- coreutils — coreutils provides the basic file, shell and text manipulation utilities of the GNU operating system.
- gzip — gzip is both a file format and a software for compression and decompression.
- tar — It provides the ability to create or decompress tar archives, as well as various other kinds of manipulation.
Development Tools
Though not necessary, users have the option of installing the base-devel group for some software development tools. This group is a requirement for building packages from the Arch User Repository.
Among base-devel are several members of the GNU toolchain, a "suite of tools used in a serial manner [...] for developing applications and operating systems". The key components of this toolchain are:
compilation and build: make
compiler collection: gcc
linker, assembler and other tools: binutils
parser generator: bison
macro processor: m4
GNU Build System (autotools):
- automatically configure source code: autoconf
- automatically create Makefiles: automake
- library support script: libtool
Other Tools
Many other optional GNU tools are available in the official repositories:
Desktop environment: GNOME
Full-screen window manager: GNU Screen
Partition Manager: GNU Parted
Image editor: GIMP
Spreadsheet: Gnumeric
Widget toolkit: GTK+
See also
For a list of all current GNU projects, see All GNU Packages.