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I can attest to this. An Australian company called Sparx Systems produces an UML modelling tool called Enterprise Architect.

In a previous job, this piece of software was used and to my surprise, Linux was supported. It's up to version 7 now and for the last couple of major versions, Linux support is provided through Wine. More specifically, they support running it through the commercial version of wine, Crossover Linux.

Sometimes tools like Rational Rose or Enterprise Architect are successful at reading in the code an building a UML model that you can then attempt to parse through. I'm not familiar with the use of either, but I know it can be done, with mixed results depending on the size and complexity of the code being analyzed. Both tools are fairly expensive though, I believe.

I'm more in the "stop complaining about MS and use what works" camp than the "I (heart) Linux" camp. Here's an easy switch that will help everyone, regardless of the desktop OS:

Stop using Visio for software modeling, and switch to something that actually captures design information. Personally, I use Enterprise Architect.

Visio is drawing program. It makes pretty pictures that you can print.

EA lets you describe the parts of pieces of what you want to build, and how they are interrelated. It then draws the pretty picture of what you're planning to build ... or creates a web site of the model with a single click ... or creates a word processing document ... or exports to an XML file ... or exports to our internal wiki ... or plugs into Eclipse ... or generates stub code and DDLs ... or ... well, you get the picture.

• Affordable
• It covers all of our UML needs (not only class diagrams)
• Connects pretty well with Oracle or PostgreSQL
• Powerful report generation
• Support replicas for distributed work
• ... more features I haven't used

I'll second that - go for a UML reverse engineering tool that can turn your C++ into UML class diagrams.

I've used IBM/Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect to do this and it works well. Rose is way too expensive for students unless your department has licenses.

I would go for Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems
(http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/).

Have a look at http://sparxsystems.com.au/products/academic_prici ng.html
which lists the academic pricing. You will be after the Professional edition which does the reverse engineering.
For what it can do, the academic edition is a bargain.

So what will a tool like this give you. A list of all the packages/directories/sub-packages/modules in your system.
A UML class diagram for each package showing all classes and relationships between classes, includinge aggregation and inheritance relationships. Each class will have the name, attributes/types and all operations/methods with their signatures.

You can then use Enterprise Architect to further document every single class/relationship/atttribute/method.

Finally, you can from the reverse engineered model automaticaly produce API documentation for the entire system either in an RTF document or HTML somewhat similar to doxygen.

Your team can then use the class diagrams and the API documentation to help you understand the design of the system you are studying. Basically you can extract the detailed design document for the system using this technique. Having this information in addition to the source code is invaluable. Just having the source code, for a sufficiently large system is a nightmare.

I'll second that - go for a UML reverse engineering tool that can turn your C++ into UML class diagrams.

I've used IBM/Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect to do this and it works well. Rose is way too expensive for students unless your department has licenses.

I would go for Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems
(http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/).

Have a look at http://sparxsystems.com.au/products/academic_prici ng.html
which lists the academic pricing. You will be after the Professional edition which does the reverse engineering.
For what it can do, the academic edition is a bargain.

So what will a tool like this give you. A list of all the packages/directories/sub-packages/modules in your system.
A UML class diagram for each package showing all classes and relationships between classes, includinge aggregation and inheritance relationships. Each class will have the name, attributes/types and all operations/methods with their signatures.

You can then use Enterprise Architect to further document every single class/relationship/atttribute/method.

Finally, you can from the reverse engineered model automaticaly produce API documentation for the entire system either in an RTF document or HTML somewhat similar to doxygen.

Your team can then use the class diagrams and the API documentation to help you understand the design of the system you are studying. Basically you can extract the detailed design document for the system using this technique. Having this information in addition to the source code is invaluable. Just having the source code, for a sufficiently large system is a nightmare.

I've been running Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect for about 1.5yrs on Windows. Prior to that, I was running Rational Rose - but got sick of paying out the ass for upgrades each year. EA, as it's known, rivals Rose in many ways and costs less than $200/seat. I absolutely love it. It doesn't entirely answer your question; So recently, I discovered that it works flawlessly on Linux via CrossOver Office (assuming you copy over MS Sans Serif from Windows). Check it out (there's an unlimited 30 day trial version) or send me a private message.

I've used Rational Rose since the 98 version and I would say it has improved in it's stability and flexibility. The real time round trip C# code generation from UML models in Rational XDE is also quite nice. However, when I recently worked for a client who wanted to begin introducing formalized requirements and analysis to their developers, I could not help the tech director justify the cost of Rational products. So instead, we discovered Enterprise Architect for Windows from Sparx Systems, an Aussie company. From $95-180 per seat for a single user, this tool can do most anything Rose Enterprise Edition can. In addition, it includes better tools for doing project estimation, risk management, and requirements traceability. Plus - the data format is either MS-Access, MS SQL, or MySQL. Therefore, you can have multiple users working on the same model. Truly worth looking into if the only reason you're not using UML tools is price.