Elego ComPact currently depends on the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) as its version control backend. CVS is free software and distributed under the GNU license. It is shipped with Elego ComPact on CD in source and binary form for all supported systems. Of course you can use your own installation of CVS, if you already have it, but to avoid incompatibilites and bugs fixed a long time ago, it should be a fairly recent one. As already mentionend, it is planned to evaluate the integration of other version control backends. You should also keep in mind that you do not need to use any command of CVS directly.
The predefined configurations for the ComPact build systems use the GNU C preprocessor to determine the dependencies of C and C++ source files. The GNU C compiler is also distributed freely under the GNU Copyright. It is included in source and binary form for Windows NT. (It is not necessary to ship executables for FreeBSD or Linux, since these systems already contain perfectly usable C/C++ development tools.)
The ComPact build system has also been configured for Java packages to use the tools of the Java Development Kit from Sun Microsystems. Java packages have been tested with JDK 1.1.8 on FreeBSD and Linux systems. As the JDK copyright prohibits distribution on commercial CDROMs, you will have to obtain a copy of the JDK yourself to be able to compile Java packages.
If you plan to use the command line oriented tools of ComPact, a modern user-friendly shell like bash, tcsh, or ksh will be very helpful. For use on Windows systems, the cygwin32 system and the MKS toolkit have been found useful solutions.
For the use of the graphical user interface, you need a modern WWW browser (preferably netscape). All the activities of configuration management supported by ComPact will be easily available through this front end.