Scripting languages

Open source scripting languages for Linux like ECMAScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, 

Tcl, etc. have been ported to many different operating systems including Mac OS 

X and Windows. Typical Windows languages like Visual Basic, Visual Basic for 

Applications (VBA), or VB.NET are available for Linux to a certain degree as 

commercial offerings (for example, REALbasic) or as free implementations (like 

VB.NET in the Mono project from Novell):

http://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/basic.shtml

All these Basic dialects are certainly relevant from a compatibility point of view 

(for example, for Excel macro migration), but do not play a central role in the 

foundation of the GNOME or KDE desktop environments since there are so 

many other natural choices there.

Python

Red Hat, for example, uses Python extensively in the installation process and at 

many other places. Tools like kudzu (which is also used for hardware recognition 

in the Debian based Knoppix distribution) are available as Python modules too. 

While using 

kudzu   probe 

is straightforward, the Python wrapper allows system 

administrators to write their own hardware recognition scripts in a much more 

elegant fashion, as you can see in Example C 1.

Example: C 1   Hardware recognition with kudzu and Python

#!/usr/bin/env python

import kudzu

print kudzu.probe(kudzu.CLASS_SOCKET, kudzu.BUS_PCI, kudzu.PROBE_ALL)

print kudzu.probe(kudzu.CLASS_NETWORK,kudzu.BUS_PCI, kudzu.PROBE_ALL)

devices = kudzu.probe(kudzu.CLASS_UNSPEC, kudzu.BUS_UNSPEC, kudzu.PROBE_ALL)

for dev in devices: print dev

QT Script for applications

Most Linux scripting languages have wrappers for the GTK+, QT, and 

WxWidgets libraries and even the whole KDE/GNOME APIs, so you can easily 

write simple desktop applications or panel applets for your own purposes. It is 

also possible to embed these languages in your programs to make them 

scriptable. Trolltech, for example, decided to give ECMAScript (the standardized 

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Linux Client Migration Cookbook   A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop