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What I have here

There are thousands and thousands of programs out there that deserve mention. Out of those, I came across certain programs and thought I should share screenshots and my reviews with you.

Out of the programs which I have covered some are very famous. The others you may have never heard of. But I found them to be very useful in day to day computing.

There are programs such as notes organizers and key grabbers which make life easy but do not get the mention and credit that they should so that more people can benifit. For instance, there is this Kolourpaint painting program that came with my Fedora Core 4 distribution - I found it very useful. Finally, someone gave us an MS Paint clone that works just as well (even better) and is just as easy to use. Then I explored desktop environments and window managers other than those which shipped with my PC. While I primarily use GNOME, I found many window managers which I installed and found them worth a try. Then came my quest for a good PDF viewer. PDF is not much of an issue in Linux and many PDF programs come pre-installed with it. In spite of this I had a tough time finding a PDF viewer which read PDF documents well plus followed embedded hyperlinks when I found Gnome PDF Viewer. Talking about PDF, I also discovered that OpenOffice.org Writer is a good PDF creator and I can convert my SXW and DOC documents to PDF using it. Though the ps2pdf command line utility is the PDF creator of choice in Linux, I first have to first convert my document to PostScript files for using it. So OpenOffice.org writer seemed as a good tool for my purpose. Then came my struggle for getting my Linux box to play video. This is the toughest task I faced during configuring my Linux box (apart from getting Tomcat to working with MySQL using MySQL Connector/J JDBC driver - but thats a different story). Finally I discovered that the video players that came with my Linux distro will not play video no matter what I did. Thats when I discovered Mplayer. Mauriat Miranda's Fedora-Mplayer help page helped me to configure and install Mplayer. At last I had a Video player which actually played video - and it plays any damn format you throw at it. Mencoder, a very powerful video encoder also came bundled with Mplayer.

While writing this section I have tried to stir clear of traditional Unix/Linux utilities (such as Vim) because theres such a lot of material about them on the Web. I have tried to focus on easy to use (and configure) applications which have graphical user interfaces. Though I unreservedly agree with the fact that the most powerful Unix/Linux applications are command-line driven, the general users like the simple point and click approach better. I personally try to have the best of both worlds - the power of the command line for tasks which are done better by punching commands and graphical programs for word processing, Web surfing, email, etc. Its a matter of individual choice - after all, thats what the free world is all about, isn't it?

I have not covered any programming utilities, since they too, are very well covered in other places on the Web.

You can select a program category from the "Categories" table and go for the ride. I hope that you like this section and find it useful.

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