List of GNU packages

This list of GNU packages lists notable software packages developed for or maintained by the Free Software Foundation as part of the GNU project, a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. Many of these software packages are used together with the Linux kernel to build complete computer operating systems.

What it means to be a GNU package

Summarising the situation in 2013, Richard Stallman identified nine aspects which generally apply to being a GNU package, but he noted that exceptions and flexibility are possible when there are good reasons:

1. The package should say that it is a GNU package
2. It should be distributed via ftp.gnu.org, or another site offering access to everyone
3. The package's homepage should be on the GNU website
4. The developers must pay attention to making their software work well with other GNU packages
5. Documentation should be in Texinfo format, or in a format easily convertible to Texinfo
6. Should use GNU Guile for its extension language, but exceptions are explicitly possible in this regard
7. Should not recommend any non-free program, nor refer the user to any non-free documentation or non-free software
8. Use GNU terminology, such as GNU/Linux for the operating system and "free software" rather than "open source"
9. The maintainer should be contactable, at least infrequently, to discuss problems in the software or fixing compatibility issues

Base system

There is no official "base system" of the GNU operating system. GNU was designed to be a replacement for Unix operating systems of the 1980s and used the POSIX standards as a guide, but either definition would give a much larger "base system". The following list is instead a small set of GNU packages which seem closer to being "core" packages than being in any of the further down sections. Inclusions (such as plotutils) and exclusions (such as the C standard library) are of course debatable.

Name	Description	Provides	Version 1	Date 1
Bash	GNU's UNIX compatible shell	bash	4.2 (February 13, 2011 (2011-02-13)) [±]	20-02-2009
coreutils	Base commands	fileutils: chgrp, chown, chmod, cp, dd, df, dir, du, ln, ls, mkdir, mkfifo, mknod, mv, rm, etc. textutils: cat, cksum, head, tail, md5sum, nl, od, pr, tsort, join, wc, tac, paste, etc. shellutils: basename, chroot, date, dirname, echo, env, groups, hostname, nice, nohup, printf, sleep, etc.	8.21 (February 14, 2013 (2013-02-14)) [±]	12-10-2011
cpio	archiving program	cpio	2.11 (March 10, 2010 (2010-03-10)) [±]	20-12-2004
diffutils	contains utilies to compare files	diff, cmp, diff3, sdiff	3.2	02-09-2011
findutils	contains search utilities	find, locate, xargs	4.2.28	05-8-2006
finger	user information	n/a	1.37	28-10-1992
grep	search for strings in files	grep	2.10	16-11-2011
groff	document processing system (groff)	groff	1.22.2 (February 7, 2013 (2013-02-07)) [±]	4-9-2005
GRUB 2	GRand Unified Bootloader	grub	2.00 (GRUB2) (June 27, 2012 (2012-06-27)) [±]	14-05-2011
gzip	compression program (gzip)	gzip	1.5 (June 17, 2012 (2012-06-17)) [±]	13-4-2007
hurd 3	a microkernel-based set of servers that perform the same function as a UNIX kernel	n/a	0.3	12-6-1997
inetutils	useful utils for networking	ftp, telnet, rsh, rlogin, tftp	1.9	31-12-2011
linux-libre	a kernel that is maintained from modified versions of the Linux kernel to remove any software that does not include its source code, has its source code obfuscated or released under proprietary licenses.	n/a	3.8.4	20.03.2013
plotutils	useful utils for plotting to different devices	graph, libplot, libplotter	2.5	07-05-2006
readline	useful library for reading command lines	readline	6.2 (February 14, 2011 (2011-02-14)) [±]	09-12-2005, 16-3-2006
screen	a terminal multiplexer	screen	4.0.3 (August 7, 2008 (2008-08-07)) [±]	27-1-2004
tar	Archiver able to create and handle file archives in various formats	tar	1.26 (March 13, 2011 (2011-03-13)) [±]	5-3-2009
texinfo	documentation system for producing online and printed manuals	n/a	5.1 (March 12, 2013 (2013-03-12)) [±]	26-9-2006
time	program to determine the duration of execution of a particular command	time	1.7	11-7-1996

Notes

1. Stable versions. Note that some distros (e.g., Gentoo) use some development versions in case the stable versions are a bit old.
2. Note that because GRUB is unstable, there is no stable version, although many distros use it as default.
3. Note that because HURD is under active development, there is no stable version. Hurd is distributed through version control systems.

Development

1. GNU build system – contains autoconf and automake
2. Gnulib – portability library designed for use with the GNU build system
3. GNU Binutils – contains the GNU assembler (as) and the GNU linker (ld)
4. GNU make – the Make program for GNU
5. GNU Compiler Collection – optimizing compiler for many programming languages, including C, C++, Fortran, Ada, and Java.
6. Data Display Debugger – debugger front-end for several debuggers (ddd)
7. GNU Debugger – an advanced debugger (gdb)
8. GNU C Library (glibc) – POSIX compliant C library
9. GNU pth – software threads for POSIX-compatible operating systems.
10. GNU Libtool – Shared library support
11. GNU libmicrohttpd – embeddable HTTP server
12. GNU m4 – macro processor
13. GNU gperf - perfect hash function generator
14. GNU gettext – internationalization library
15. GNU lightning – just-in-time compilation that generating machine language
16. DotGNU – replacement for Microsoft .NET
17. GNU Classpath – libraries for Java
18. GNU bison – parser generator intended to replace yacc
19. GNU Guile – embeddable Scheme interpreter (extension language)
20. BFD – object file library
21. GNU MDK – a development kit for programming in MIX
22. GNU indent – a program to indent C and C++ source code.
23. GNU FriBidi – a library that implements Unicode's Bidirectional Algorithm
24. MIT/GNU Scheme – interpreter, compiler and library for the Scheme programming language developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
25. SmartEiffel – the GNU Eiffel compiler
26. GNU Smalltalk – ANSI Smalltalk-98 implementation (interpreter and class library).
27. CLISP – ANSI Common Lisp implementation (compiler, debugger, and interpreter)
28. GNU Common Lisp – an implementation of Common Lisp
29. Gawk – GNU awk implementation
30. GNU Fontutils – font management utilities
31. GNU cflow – generate C flow graph.
32. GNU AutoGen – An active tier-style tool for automated code generation.
33. GNU cppi – Indent the C preprocessor directives in files to reflect their nesting.

Graphical desktop

1. GIMP – the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a bitmap image editor that is similar to Photoshop
2. GTK+ – the GIMP Toolkit, contains the GTK+, GDK, and GLib set of libraries (used by the GIMP and GNOME)
3. GNOME – the GNU Network Object Model Environment, the official GNU Desktop
4. Dia – a vector graphics program for creating diagrams
5. GNUstep – implementation of the Cocoa/OpenStep libraries and development tools for graphical applications
6. Window Maker – the window manager for the GNUstep-environment

Applications and utilities

1. Bazaar – distributed revision control system
2. GNU arch – a distributed revision control system
3. Gnash – player and browser plugin for the Adobe Flash file format
4. GNU Alexandria – package of the GNU system that makes use of GNU Bayonne to provide a means to deliver access to electronic content and services for the blind over the public telephone network
5. GNU Anubis – outgoing mail processor that sits between the MUA (Mail User Agent) and the MTA (Mail Transport Agent)
6. GNU Aspell – spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell
7. GNU Accounting Utils – set of utilities providing statistics on users and processes (last, ac, accton, lastcomm, sa, dump-utmp, dump-acct)
8. GnuCash – the GNU financial accounting application
9. GNU Ddrescue – the GNU data recovery tool
10. GNU Emacs – the Emacs editor of the GNU operating system
11. GNU fcrypt - On the fly encryption
12. GNU Health – The Free Health and Hospital Information System
13. GNUmed – the medical practice management software
14. Gnumeric – the GNU spreadsheet program
15. GNU libextractor – metadata extraction library and tool
16. GNU LilyPond – music typesetting application
17. GNU Mailman – a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists
18. GNU Parted – Partitioning program
19. GNU nano - text editor
20. GNU Parallel – build and execute command lines from standard input in parallel
21. pexec – parallel execution of shell commands (on a single host or on multiple hosts involving SSH)
22. GNU Privacy Guard – PGP encryption replacement
23. GNU wget – advanced file retrieval from networks and the Internet
24. GNUnet – decentralized, peer-to-peer communication network designed to be resistant to censorship
25. GNU Robots – game for computer programmers
26. GnuTLS – TLS replacement protocol
27. GNU Typist – Universal (multi-lingual) typing tutor. The last release, version 2.9.2, has been released on Dec 12, 2012.
28. Gnuzilla – Internet suite
29. GNU Ferret – Free Entity Relationship and Reverse Engineering Tool. SQL database designer
30. lsh – implementation of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol version 2
31. Ocrad – GNU Optical Character Recognition
32. GNU Stow – a program for managing the installation of software packages.
33. GNU gcal – a program for calculating and printing calendars.
34. GNU Units, a software program for unit conversion.
35. GNU Guix, a package manager and distribution of the GNU System.

Scientific software

Name	Description	Provides	Version 1	Date 1
GNU Octave	A program for numerical computations.
GSL	The GNU Scientific Library
GMP	arbitrary precision numerical calculation programming library
PSPP	A statistical program that rivals SPSS
GNU R	a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics
GNU Archimedes	a TCAD software for semiconductor device simulations.
GNU XaoS	fractal zoomer

Games

1. GNU Backgammon - A backgammon game
2. GNUbik - A free software implementation of Rubiks Cube
3. GNU Chess - A chess game engine for use with glChess, Xboard or similar
4. GNU Go - An implementation of Go (game)
5. Gnu Jump – Game where the goal is to climb a tower jumping the platforms trying not to fall down

Other

A user page at a GNU MediaGoblin 0.2.0 -based website

1. GNU Miscfiles – several data files including standard airport, country, and language codes
2. GnowSys – a kernel for semantic computing (a distributed agent oriented knowledge base.)
3. Gnucap – the GNU Circuit Analysis Package
4. Gnu Panorama – 3D Framework, ray tracing
5. Gnu Sovix – PHP-based website revision system
6. Gnu Maverik – Virtual Reality microkernel
7. 3DLDF – graphics package
8. GNU LibreDWG – Library for reading and writing .dwg files
9. GNU dbm (or GDBM)
10. GNU MediaGoblin – Decentralized media sharing

See also

• GNU Project
• Free software movement
• High Priority Free Software Projects

External links

• FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory – All GNU Packages