The GNU Compiler Collection is a suite of compilers that compile C, C++, Objective C, Fortran, Java, and CHILL for a wide variety of architectures. Front-ends for Ada95 and Pascal also exist. GCC development is a part of the GNU Project, aiming to improve the compiler used in the GNU system including the GNU/Linux variant.

Wine is an implementation of the Windows APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine provides both a development toolkit (Winelib) for porting Windows sources to Unix and a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows binaries to run under Intel Unixes. Wine works on most popular Intel Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Well known as a stable and robust operating system, Red Hat Linux is flexible enough for almost any computing need from a simple workstation to powerful server. Red Hat Linux 9 was released in 2003. This was the latest release of the 'Red Hat Linux' distribution. Nowdays Red hat is providing the 'Enterprise Linux' distribution while sponsoring the development of 'Fedora Core Linux'.

Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. The Apache project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for various modern desktop and server operating systems, such as UNIX and Windows NT.

Linux is a Unix clone written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX compliance. It has all the features you would expect in a modern fully-fledged Unix, including true multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, shared copy-on-write executables, proper memory management and TCP/IP networking.

Damn Small Linux is a business card size (50MB) bootable Live CD Linux distribution. Despite its minuscule size it strives to have a functional and easy to use desktop.

Apache Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. The Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications are developed by Sun under the Java Community Process. Apache Tomcat is developed in an open and participatory environment and released under the Apache Software License.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. VLC can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Qt is a GUI software toolkit. Qt simplifies the task of writing and maintaining GUI (graphical user interface) applications. Qt is written in C++ and is fully object-oriented. It has everything you need to create professional GUI applications. And it enables you to create them quickly. Qt is a multi-platform toolkit.

BackTrack is the result of the merging of the two innovative penetration testing live linux distributions Auditor security collection and Whax. By combining the best features from both distributions and putting continous development energy, the most complete and finest security testing live distro was born: BackTrack.