Initially, running treeps brings up an X window with a menu at the top and a tree based representation of running processes. From this, you can visualise the hierarchical nature of processes, and manipulate the tree to display left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and in a star formation.

A range of information may be displayed about each process, including user and group IDs, memory usage, CPU time and loading. Additionally, processes may be colour coded according to user-definable criteria, which helps understand which processes are using the most memory at a glance, for example.

Treeps updates in real time, and can provide a really interesting and useful picture of what is happening on the system. Having been in development since 1991 or so, the application is very efficient in terms of memory usage and system loading. The sheer number of features, such as the extensive menu system, mouse-over hints, and built-in help also help to make treeps a mature system tool.

Treeps uses the commercial Motif toolkit for the GUI, although statically linked versions are available in a variety of package formats. Source is also provided for those who like to build their own and have Motif or LessTiff installed.

As a language that emphasises correctness of design and implementation in software engineering, Eiffel is commonly used for teaching purposes, and may be found as part of the syllabus at a number of universities and other institutions. One of the problems for student programmers, however, is that useful Eiffel compilers have generally been expensive and not available for Linux and other free OSes.

SmallEiffel is a free, GNU-licensed Eiffel compiler which is able to generate C code and Java bytecode -- it is quite normal for an Eiffel compiler to generate C code. From there, existing compilers (such as gcc) are utilised to generate the final object code that is executed by the system.

The SmallEiffel package comes with the compiler(s), Eiffel libraries and a number of support utilities including documentation extraction and generation tools. A pre-compiled version for Linux is available for glibc2 systems; as well as the full source code, which builds cleanly on a standard Red Hat 5 machine. The Web site is also a good starting point for locating information about Eiffel and software engineering in general.

Written itself with Tcl and a high level GUI toolkit for Tk called Tix, Tcl Developer Studio runs under X and provides a convenient framework for project development. The main concept is that of a project: a collection of source files and associated common attributes. With Tcl Developer Studio, a project may be worked on from one place with all of the components logically organised and readily accessible.

The central component of Tcl Developer Studio is a text editor that features syntax highlighting, indenting and function templates. To the left of the editor is a navigation tree that displays files in a project, and functions within files. Below these are output windows, which can display debugging information and results of file searches.

This should be a familiar environment for anyone who has used IDEs previously. Tcl Developer Studio is implemented simply and effectively, and doesn't get in the way as much as some IDEs can.

Installation is quite straightforward. After unpacking the software and doing a 'make' and 'make install', synchronise the font database with 'xfstt -sync' then run the font server in the background with 'xfstt &'. If RPMs are provided with your distribution, these steps may be taken during installation.

The font server will listen, by default, on port 7100. You can access its fonts by adding 'unix/:7100' to your font path (check the documentation for more detailed instructions).

In the simplest mode, you type qstat followed by the address of the server. You may also supply the port number and type of server, query more than one server at once, and specify a number of other advanced options (see the documentation as these are growing quickly).

Typical information displayed includes the map level, number of players and ping time. If available, player details and general information about the server may be displayed, along with a variety of game-specific data.