Other cool Internet sites

About the World Wide Web

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W³C), the World Wide Web standards people. The W³C is the home of the Amaya WWW browser. (Amaya is still under development; binaries are available for Linux/i386 and SparcLinux, and so is source [but it requires Motif to compile].)
• Here's a gratuitous Mozilla link for your edification.
• Arena development has been taken over by Yggdrasil: new versions support HTTP 1.1 and are covered under the GPL.
• A new version of Chimera, another X11-based WWW browser, is in Alpha.
• The Emacs w3-mode web browser (aka GNUscape) is pretty neat (and supports inlined graphics within XEmacs). If you're using Emacs to create web pages, you may also want to use HTML Helper Mode, which includes features like templates and automated datestamps. I use it for all of my pages.
• For those of you with a text-only surfing jones, try Lynx, the web browser without graphics (which is the browser I use 99% of the time).
• If you're interested in setting up a web server, check out Apache, the most popular web server in the world (and it's totally free). Several of our mirror sites use this software.
• Roxen is another good, free web server.

Programming Languages

• Check out Python, a very powerful scripting language that (IMHO) beats the pants off Perl and Tcl for general programming any day of the week. Python is used by Infoseek in its web robots and forms the core of the Red Hat distribution's installer. It is also used to generate the headers and footers for these pages. See also:
  • The Grail web browser's home page. Grail supports applets written in Python.
  • FindNew.py, a Python script I wrote which checks for updated web pages on a hotlist. [this site]
  • Euclid.py, which finds the greatest common divisor of two integers (I wrote it for my Elementary Number Theory class). [this site]
  • MirrorTo.py, which mirrors from your disk to a remote disk. It's a hacked version of the mirror script that comes in the Python tools collection. I recommend using rsync instead unless you can't install binaries on your target system.
  • Minimum Spanning Trees in Python (my Introduction to Algorithms project for Fall 1997). [this site]
  • For those Amiga users who still boot into AmigaOS occasionally (I can't imagine why you'd want to ;), there's also an AmigaOS port.
  • Coming soon(?): My port of RoutePlanner (a highway trip planner) to Python/Tkinter. The Python 1.5 release has it closer to an acceptable speed on 68040-class machines (and it's great on a PowerPC... I just need to sit down and fix the bugs).
  • See also: Games!.
• Perl 5's home page, for those of you who enjoy writing and reading code that looks like line noise.
• The Tcl and Tk home page. Also check out The Tix Project, a good GUI toolkit for Tcl/Tk.
• The JOLT Project is an effort to create a completely free implementation of Java.

Emulation and Universal APIs

• The Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator. [Germany]
• The Amiga Research OS project. Another approach to AmigaOS emulation/duplication, which has run at least some AmigaOS binaries under Linux/m68k :-). [Sweden]
• Convergence is an effort to develop a universal API for non-Wintel software to link against.

Graphics Formats and Tools

• The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format has its own web pages. PNG is generally considered to be superior to the GIF format, which it is intended to replace; it is now supported by most major web browsers.
• xearth is a neat, CPU-intensive and color-stealing gizmo which replaces your X backdrop with a (gasp) image of the Earth. (Note: You'll need to either run a 2-color or 256-color display to use this...)
• The Persistence of Vision raytracer (POVRay) home page.
• The XAnim home page recently moved. XAnim is a multi-format animation viewer for the X Window System.
• The GIMP is a GPL-ed image manipulation program (kinda like Photoshop or ADPro) for X. It was used to create the "official" Linux logo. It uses the Gtk toolkit.
• XV, a popular X-based picture viewer (shareware; free for non-commercial use), now has a page on the Web.
• No discussion would be complete without mentioning ppmtofb, my favorite picture viewer ;-).
• Looking for fonts? Then look no further than the comp.fonts Home Page.

Window Managers

• A home page now exists for the ubquitous FVWM X11 window manager.
• FVWM-95 is a modified version of FVWM2 that looks more like Windows 95. This may or may not be a good thing. :-)
• Also check out AfterStep, a nice window manager based on FVWM that has a NeXTStep look and feel.
• You might like amiwm, a window manager with a AmigaOS look and feel. I've fooled around with it a little, and it looks promising (and makes me homesick for AmigaOS ;). [Sweden]
• Other neat window managers include icewm, Enlightenment and WindowMaker.
• KDE is an effort to create a CDE-like environment for Linux, based on Qt. So is GNOME, which uses Gtk.
• Some interesting configurations for various window managers can be found at Themes for X.
• The definitive window manager page on the Internet is here. It has info on all of the above window managers, plus many others (including IceWM, my current WM of choice).

Games!

• LinCity is a free X11 game similar to SimCity. [United Kingdom]
• Civilization clones (X-based):
  • Freeciv is written in C and IMHO looks better than the original did (at least on my Amiga). [Denmark]
  • OpenCiv uses Python and Tkinter and the CLIPS expert system, so it is easy to modify. [The Netherlands]

Miscellany

• Eric S. Raymond has a page about all his freeware (fetchmail is boffo). Eric also has all sorts of other cool stuff at his site.
• Mike Gleason has set up a NcFTP Home Page, about his popular FTP client.
• Bob Willmot has created a page about using the Iomega Jaz Drive under Linux.
• XForms has finally been ported to Linux/m68k. This toolkit allows rapid GUI programming under X, and doesn't require Motif.
• XEmacs -- A version of Emacs for those of you who thought GNU Emacs was too small ;-). It has better X11 support and also includes a font-lock mode for tty-based displays.
• Lesstif is the GPL-ed Motif clone.
• Mutt is a new email program with a clean, text-based user interface.
• rsync is the coolest file distribution tool since FTP; I recommend it highly.
• AbiWord is a (somewhat buggy) GPL'ed word processor.

Other Somewhat Useful Sites

• The Yahoo! Internet directory.
• Google!.
• The AltaVista web and Usenet directory.
• The Go Network, with a web and Usenet directory (powered by Python). [Also home of ESPN.com, reason enough to visit!]
• The DejaNews searchable Usenet archive.
• Internet RFCs, the de facto standards used by the Internet.