EmptyCrate Software. Travel. Stuff.

colorgcc is an awesome little tool for colorizing the output of gcc and g++, making compiler errors and warnings much easier to spot.

It hasn't been updated since 1999, but it hardly seems to matter. It's written in perl and available on most (if not all) Linux distributions. In gentoo colorgcc is installed as a compiler front-end. This makes it trivially easy to use.

The Portable Ubuntu for Windows team has made available an Ubuntu distribution that runs fully inside of Windows using the coLinux kernel. The concept is fascinating, but it does fall down in a few places. First of all, on my Acer Aspire One, it takes a very long time to get started, which is probably fair because it is starting up an entire OS inside of the current one. Also, it seems to use a significant amount of RAM. This causes a lot of swapping on this 1G machine.