Contents of Essentials

Allegro is a multi-platform game library that provides many functions for graphics, sounds, player input (keyboard, mouse, and joystick), and timers. It also provides fixed and floating point mathematical functions, 3D functions, file management functions, compressed datafile, and a GUI.
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The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is composed of several parts. The first is a fully modularized sound driver which supports module autoloading, devfs, isapnp autoconfiguration, and gives complete access to analog audio, digital audio, control, mixer, synthesizer, DSP, MIDI, and timer components of audio hardware. It also includes a fully-featured kernel-level sequencer, a full compatibility layer for OSS/Free applications, an object-oriented C library which covers and enhances the ALSA kernel driver functionality for applications (client/server, plugins, PCM sharing/multiplexing, PCM metering, etc.), an interactive configuration program for the driver, and some simple utilities for basic management.
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Avifile is a library that allows you to read and write compressed AVI files in most common video & audio formats (Indeo® Video, DivX, etc.) under x86 Linux. Compression and decompression are performed with Win32 DLLs. It includes a simple AVI player and a Video4Linux capture program. Currently it is under heavy development, and while some features (such as AVI playback) already work, some (audio compression) are not yet successfully implemented.
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CheckInstall keeps track of all files installed by a "make install" or equivalent, creates a Slackware, RPM, or Debian package with those files, and adds it to the installed packages database, allowing for easy package removal or distribution.
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Comma separated index files of the cover discs, ready for import into the data base of your choice.
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GLib is a library containing many useful C routines for things such as trees, hashes, and lists. GLib was previously distributed with the GTK toolkit, but has been split off as of the developers' version 1.1.0.
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GNU C library (glibc) is one of the most important components of GNU Hurd and most modern Linux distributions. It is used by almost all C programs and provides the most essential program interface. Version 2.1 is a companion to Kernel 2.2.x.
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GTK, which stands for the Gimp ToolKit, is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It is designed to be small and efficient, but still flexible enough to allow the programmer freedom in the interfaces created. GTK provides some unique features over standard widget libraries.
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gtkmm (previously known as Gtk--) is a C++ interface for the popular GUI library GTK+. It provides a convenient interface for C++ programmers to create graphical user interfaces with GTK+'s framework. Highlights include typesafe callbacks, widgets which are extensible by inheritance, and many classes that can be easily combined to quickly create complex user interfaces.
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Guile is a portable, embeddable Scheme implementation written in C. Guile provides a machine independent execution platform that can be linked in as a library when building extensible programs.
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Jigsaw Download, or short jigdo, is a tool designed to ease the distribution of very large files over the internet, for example CD or DVD images. Its aim is to make downloading the images as easy for users as a click on a direct download link in a browser, while avoiding all the problems that server administrators have with hosting such large files.
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This directory contains the latest kernel sources plus the patches needed to create all versions between these and those on last month's discs.
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LessTif is an implemention of the OSF/Motif standard GUI toolkit for X11. It aims to be source compatible with OSF/Motif. Most Motif apps should compile and run out of the box.
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LibESMTP is a library to manage posting (or submission of) electronic mail using SMTP to a preconfigured Mail Transport Agent (MTA) such as Exim. It may be used as part of a Mail User Agent (MUA) or another program that must be able to post electronic mail but where mail functionality is not the program's primary purpose. LibESMTP is not intended to be used as part of a program that implements a Mail Transport Agent.
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Libmcrypt is a library which provides a uniform interface to several symmetric encryption algorithms. It is intended to have a simple interface to access encryption algorithms in ofb, cbc, cfb, and ecb modes. The algorithms it supports are DES, 3DES, RIJNDAEL, Twofish, IDEA, GOST, CAST-256, ARCFOUR, SERPENT, SAFER+, and more. The algorithms and modes are also modular so you can add and remove them on the fly without recompiling the library.
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libsigc++ implements a full callback system for use in abstract interfaces and general programming. It is the most complete library of its kind with the ability to connect an abstract callback to a class method, function, or function object. It contains adaptor classes for connecting dissimilar callbacks and has an ease of use unmatched by other C++ callback libraries.
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The Standard C Library is an ongoing project to implement the ISO 14882 Standard C library as described in chapters 17 through 27 and annex D, as a drop-in replacement for the current (ARM-conformant) library.
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Libxml2 is the XML C library developed for the Gnome project. The library code is portable (to Linux, Unix, Windows, embedded systems, etc.) and modular; most of the extensions can be compiled out. Libxml2 implements a number of existing standards related to markup languages, including the XML standard, Namespaces in XML, XML Base, Relax NG, RFC 2396, XPath, XPointer, HTML4, XInclude, SGML Catalogs, and XML Catalogs. In most cases, libxml tries to implement the specifications in a relatively strict way. To some extent, it provides support for the following specifications, but doesn't claim to implement them: DOM, FTP client, HTTP client, and SAX2. Support for W3C XML Schemas is in progress. It includes xmllint, a command line XML validator.
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Mesa is a 3-D graphics library which uses the OpenGL API (Application Programming Interface). Mesa cannot be called an implementation of OpenGL since the author did not obtain an OpenGL license from SGI. Furthermore, Mesa cannot claim OpenGL conformance since the conformance tests are only available to OpenGL licensees. Despite these technical/legal terms, you may find Mesa to be a valid alternative to OpenGL. Most applications written for OpenGL can use Mesa instead without changing the source code.
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Text-based interface creation library
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Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source.
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Write images to floppy disk with Windows, needed to create Linux installer boot disks
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SDL is a library that allows you portable low-level access to a video framebuffer, audio output, mouse, and keyboard. With SDL, it is easy to write portable games which run on Linux (x86, Sparc, PPC, Alpha), Solaris (Sparc), Win32 (95, 98, NT), BeOS (x86), and MacOS (PPC).
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Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is an OS independent and full-featured boot manager with an easy-to-use user interface.
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svgalib is a low-level graphics library that provides VGA and SVGA modes in a console. It is not intended as an alternative to X for apps, but rather a set of tools for things like VGA games, image viewing in modes that X cannot support, etc.
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