LINUX: Easy Linux For Beginners, Your Step-By-Step Guide to Learning The Linux Operating System and Command Line (2015)

Chapter Six: Linux Applications

Linux distributions come pre-installed with applications for your computing needs. In this chapter, we will take a quick look at some of these applications.

Office Applications

Libre-Offfice suite is Linux’s answer to Windows Office tools. The suite comes with a word processor, presentation application, spreadsheet, calendar, and calculator applications. If you are a Windows user, you might need sometime to get use to the interface but after a few times of using the apps, you’ll eventually be familiar with it.

LibreOffice comes with the following applications:

· Writer – word processor. Files are created with a .odt file extension. Documents written with Microsoft Word are compatible with Writer.

Figure 22: How Writer Looks Like

· Calc – spreadsheet program that works similarly to Microsoft Excel. Default file has .ods file extension

Figure 23: Calc Looking Like Microsoft Excel

· Impress – the counterpart of Microsoft PowerPoint. In Impress, you can make slide presentations based from existing templates or you can also customize the same way that you can do in Microsoft Office.

Figure 24: Made to Impress

All Libre-Office applications can be accessed from the Office option in the Main Menu.

Multimedia Applications

How about accessing multimedia? Linux distributions come with apps that allow you to open photos, listen to audio files, play videos, and burn CDs or DVDs.

SUSE and Xandros distributions are pre-installed with digiKam, a digital camera software. You also have the option to access your photos as files from a USB drive. Simply click on the storage drive name and view the photos.

Both KDE and GNOME come with an audio CD player. Put your CD in and the default audio player will detect and play the audio. For other sound files like MP3s, you can use players such as XMMS or Rhythmbox. Depending on the distro that you are using, you can go to the Music Player application, Multimedia or Sound & Video category to open the players.

In recent times, different distributions have already released a built-in CD/DVD burner functionality in their file managers. These work well but if you still want a separate application to burn files, you can use the most commonly used burn software such K3b for KDE.

Imaging Applications

Linux also makes sure that you get the photo editing and graphics creation applications that you need. The two most popular in the Linux world is The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and GNOME Ghostview (GGv).

The GIMP is the equivalent of Adobe Photoshop. Users can perform image manipulation, composition, and creation. If you cannot find GIMP in the Graphics category from the main menu, check if you need to install the package first. Refer to the steps in the section Installing Additional Software to download and install The GIMP package. The application can read most image formats: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PCX, and GIF. For more information about The GIMP, visit their website at at www.gimp.org

GNOME Ghostview can read PostScript or PDF documents and has similar functionalities as Acrobat Reader. To open Ghostview on a Fedora computer, click on Graphics then PostScript Viewer.

Explore the pre-installed applications and gauge if these suits your needs. Remember, there are plenty of Linux applications that you can use so go ahead and find out the best one for you.

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In this chapter, we briefly discussed the different office, multimedia, and imaging applications that come with a Linux distribution installation. In the next chapter, we will establish a deeper understanding of the Linux command line.