What I can do in Fedora Linux

• Print out documents with my Epson printer. I didn't even have to use the driver disk to install this printer! Fedora Core already had the driver as part of the Fedora Core package.
• Internet browsing with Firefox and many other browsers (Epiphany, Galeon, Seamonkey, Konqueror, etc). With a combination of Firefox, Tor, a Firefox extension called Torbutton and Privoxy you can even do it anonymously!
• Email with Thunderbird. I was already using it in Windows and it seems to work even better in Linux! It has a built in spam filter which I learned to tweak to filter 80% of the spam I have been receiving.
• Encryption with GPG. This is an open source version of PGP and just as good if not better than PGP. Thunderbird has a plugin called Enigmail that uses GPG. I used to use a GUI for GPG called Kgpg, but found a better one called Seahorse.
• Create and mount encrypted volumes with Cryptsetup. It's similar in principle to PGP Disk.
• Type email and other documents in Japanese though in a non-Japanese language environment. (Yes, WIndows can do that too.)
• Word processing with OpenOffice. I was already using OpenOffice for word processing and spreadsheet in Windows, and so was already familiar with it. OpenOffice, unlike MS Office, has a PDF exporter option built in to the program! With MS Office you would also need to buy the very expensive Adobe Acrobat software to make PDF files from Word.
• Contact management with Kaddressbook. Finally after years of searching, I found an address book that I really like!
• View PDF files with Evince PDF viewer. It loads much faster than Adobe Acrobat! Besides Evince, there are other PDF viewers, like Kpfd which is also good, maybe better with more features, but slower than Evince. And there is even a version of Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux if you really want it.
• Listen to audio Cd's and MP3 files with Xmms
• Rip audio CDs with Grip. It can encode music tracts into ogg files which are like mp3 files in size and quality.
• Play DVDs, VCDs and view video files such as AVI, MPEG, MOV, and WMV with Video Lan (VLC), Mplayer or Xine. VLC is my usually my first choice. It's another cross platform program that I was already using in Windows. I can also play .ASF streaming multimedia files in Firefox with a combination of Gstreamer, Mplayer and the Mplayer plugin for Firefox.
• View Macromedia Flash content from youtube.com and video.google.com as well as other web sites that use streaming Macromedia Flashplayer thanks to the Flash plugin for Firefox.
• Play audio CDs with "CD Player". Just pop in an audio CD in the CD ROM drive and it will automatically play just like it would in Windows.
• Burn CDs including ISO images with K3b -- as good as Nero Burning Rom in my opinion for basic CD/DVD burning. It can also make audio CDs from MP3 files if you install the plugin.
• Create web pages with Bluefish -- a very user friendly and powerful HTML / CSS editor! (For those who know HTML and CSS.)
• Upload web pages with Gftp.
• Edit graphics with the GIMP or Gthumb. Gthumb is faster and easier to use for simple graphic editing like resizing.
• View graphics rapidly with Gthumb - better than the default program in Windows XP because it can also do some basic editing! KDE's Kuickshow is also good to view graphics and options to change the brightness, contrast and gamma.
• Look up words with Gnome Dictionary
• Have an applet running in the taskbar that tells me the outside temperature and weather.
• Schedule appointments with Mozilla Sunbird, a calendar program I run from startup.
• Run Windows apps that are not yet available in Linux with WINE For example, I can use AT&T Natural Voices - a text to voice speech engine with Text Aloud.
• Run Windows apps that Wine cannot yet run from within Windows on Linux using vitalization with the Xen virtual machine monitor.
• Use Skype! Skype is available in Linux!
• Chat on Yahoo! Messenger. There is a Linux version available.
• Use Bittorrent to download big files
• Learned to use Partimage to make an image file of my system for a backup.
• Make fancy layouts with Scribus Open Source Desktop Publishing program on Nov. 15, 2005. Scribus is similar to Adobe Pagemaker or MS Publisher. I did a fancy layout in Scribus that would be difficult to do using OpenOffice Writer, saved it in PDF format, and printed it out at my friend's house. (His printer is better than mine.)
• Use a scanner with Xsane to scan photos, graphics, and text.
• Convert printed text into file text format after scanning with Xsane using Gocr. I could not install Gocr with Yum but found an RPM that worked for Fedora from http://dag.wieers.com/packages/gocr/
• Download entire web sites with a single command with Wget.
• Access shared folders of my Windows laptop using Samba Can also access shared folders of my Linux PC from Windows too! Thanks to Samba I can now play a DVD from my Linux PC to show on my older Windows 2000 PC that has only a CD Rom drive! (Windows PC is in a more convenient location) Using Samba networking, I can also write files to my NTFS formatted USB drive from the Linux PC when the USB drive attached to the Windows PC. (Normally Linux can only read from NTFS formatted disks, not write to them.)
• Resize partitions with GParted.
• Edit video files with Avidemux. So cool! I never did any type of video editing in Windows and so this is something new for me! I used Yum to download and install Avidemux.
• Convert DVD disks to AVI files with dvd::rip and Acidrip
• Create DVD images from avi / mpg files with Devede.
• Read RSS newsfeeds with Akregator
• Use a dual monitor to make my work easier thanks to Nvidia Geforce's linux driver support for its graphics cards.
• View .chm files with ChmSee HTML help viewer.
• Make a synchronized backup with Grsync. By 'synchronized' I mean not only updating newer files on the target media, but deleting older files on the target media which no longer exist on the source media. Maybe Windows has something like this too, but I've never ran into it.
• Use Zim to keep tract of my notes and articles I want to refer to frequently. Zim aims at bringing the concept of a wiki to the desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically.
• Do a CPU benchmark with HardInfo. It has a network database updater to download the latest benchmark information from the Internet. I try to keep my hardware updated to be at least half of current top CPU performance.

All of the software listed on this page are either part of Fedora 8 or can be downloaded freely from the Internet. They are all open source. My hat is off to those who worked so hard to make this software and offer it to the public at no cost whatsoever. Not only are these applications free as in "freedom", they are free as in "free lunch" -- the first truly free lunch since the loaves and fishes Jesus fed to the multitudes! (Ref: The Bible Matthew chapter 14)

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