So I was looking for something earlier in the week, when I ran across something fairly interesting: Chocolatey. A windows alternative to YUM/Aptitude/Synaptic.

For the *unix-ignorant, those are package management tools installed with your flavor of distro. They typically ship with a GUI for ease of use, but (and the relevant part) they also work with terminal/command line usage. With ubuntu, for example, you could toss "sudo apt-get install 7zip" and it would install 7zip.

Its actually fairly easy to install, as well. The Install Guide has a few methods, but easiest way is to just pop open a cmd window and paste the code listed in command line.

The gallery has a fairly nice list of software and fairly easy to install too. Couple random pokes at a keyboard in a command window, no installation window opens and no need for configuration.