Scooter Software has a fantastic program called Beyond Compare. It is available in both Windows and Linux. Having used this in Windows, I wanted to give it a shot in Linux. All the instructions are available on the vendor’s website; however, after reading through them, here is a simplified set of instructions.

This was a fresh install of CentOS 5.7 / Red Hat Enterprise Linux (“RHEL”) 5.7.

Beyond Compare requires X Windows access to use. Download and use XMing, which is an X Window Server for Microsoft Windows. It should be bundled with Putty. If you need to reference how to configure XMing, I have an article here.

Download Beyond Compare 3 for Linux
Note: The version may change, so check their site.

wget http://www.scootersoftware.com/bcompare-3.3.4.14431.tar.gz

Extract the files

tar zxvf bcompare*.tar.gz

Install Beyond Compare

cd bcompare-*
./install.sh

Register Beyond Compare
If you have purchased a registration number from Scooter Software, there are several options to register your product.
– To register for a single user, select Help > Enter Key and paste in your license.
– To register for a single user without running BC3, save your license key in the text file “~username/.beyondcompare/BC3Key.txt”.
– To register for all users, save your license key in the text file “/etc/BC3Key.txt”.

Run Beyond Compare

bcompare

Locations for Beyond Compare
$HOME/bin/bcompare (non-root install)
/usr/bin/bcompare (root install)