The applications

Mandriva offers you about 4000 software packages (on the Mandriva Linux CD's or DVD's, via the sources on the Internet a multitude of additional packages is available). That is obviously way too much to discuss everything, so we will only discuss those packages we think are most important. Most of these are installed by default.

System applications

Let's start with the system applications, maybe not the most spectacular section, but important to get to know your Mandriva Linux system:

There are two kinds of configuration between which a difference is made in Mandriva Linux. Configurations that have to do with the settings for one single account (such as background or language preference, ...) are managed in the KDE Control Center (in the menu called Control Center). Configuration that is related to the system as such, independent from the account (such as system clock synchronization, software installation, ...) normally is managed in the Mandriva Control Center (the MCC), in the menu called Configure Your Computer.

Figure 19: KDE Control Center

In the KDE Control Center (see Figure 19: KDE Control Center) you can modify your personal KDE desktop settings. The changes you make will only be applicable to your own user account. Another user will probably have other preferences and he can make and store his own settings independent from yours. That makes it for instance possible for each member of the family to adapt his PC experience according to his or her personal preference. In the KDE Control Center some system wide settings do exist such as for instance network. With those functions a button is foreseen to enter the Administrator Mode. As long as one does not push this button (and enters the required root password), it is not possible to make changes in that section (to prevent unauthorized people to make system changes). For the other, account specific changes, no password is required. Here are some examples of settings you can configure via the KDE Control Center:

• File associations to indicate what application should be used for specific types of files (Note: these settings only have effect to applications that indeed take the KDE settings into account. Some applications (for instance Firefox and Thunderbird) do not and have their own settings for this).

• Theme manager to modify the visual theme of your KDE environment. The best explanation for this is an image. See Figure 20.: Keramik theme where the desktop after a simple selection was changed from the standard Mandriva theme (visible in all the other images in this article) to the Keramik theme. Creative people even can, if they so would wish, create their own theme.

">"> Figure 20.: Keramik theme

• Language and region settings which allow you to chose in what language your applications will be shown and what your preferences for measurements are (for instance € for currency, the way the date is shown, etc.). 
• Appearance and behavior of your desktop (background, panels, screensaver, virtual desktops, etc.).

In the MCC (Mandriva Control Center) some user friendly tools are provided to administer your system, at least if you know the required root password (see Figure 21.: the MCC (Mandriva Control Center)).

You will probably use it most to manage your software packages (even if only to update them). Installing software is very easy with the MCC, at least if you have first set the correct installation sources. By default Mandriva anticipates your installation media (the CD's or DVD from which you installed Mandriva) as only installation sources, but it is possible to use servers on the Internet as software installation sources (very useful if you have broadband, for the most up-to-date versions but also because these servers have even a lot more packages then what is on the CD's or DVD). You manage your installation sources with the Media Manager. In the MCC under Software Management this is called Select from where software packages are downloaded when updating the system.

Figure 22: Adding Main, Contrib and updates automatically

Via the Add button in the Media Manager you can have update, main and contrib media added automatically (see result in Figure 22: Adding Main, Contrib and updates automatically). These contain all official packages that Mandriva provides. If you want to add unofficial packages from others, you will have to add them manually. You can find help on how to do this on at least three places on the Internet:

• the Mandriva page itself (http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/view/Downloads/MirrorFinder2), which also includes the sources for club members (software only distributed to club members and the commercial packages).

• easyurpmi (http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/), which gives some more explanation

• smarturpmi (http://www.mandrivauser.de/smarturpmi/) which is similar to easyurpmi, but also indicates per update mirror what date it was last updated (not all mirrors update with the same speed).

Both web pages give you a command per source you can introduce at a command prompt. This is very easy to do: You start Konsole (via the icon on the panel). At the prompt from Konsole you first give the command su and enter the root password. Thanks to that, all commands you will enter next will be executed with root rights. Then you simply copy the command from the web page at the prompt, click enter and wait till the command has been processed before entering the following one.

If you are really allergic to commands, you can do the same with the Add Custom button in the Media Manager. But then you make it yourself a tad more difficult since you have to copy the correct pieces of the command in the right place of the graphical interface.

WATCH OUT: Make sure that on the web page you select the correct version of Mandriva Linux. If you configure installation sources of a wrong version, you will install software packages of a wrong version, and that is something you really need to avoid.

To really enjoy the full benefit of your Mandriva Linux, you'd best configure the following installation sources:

Main (containing the the main packages created by Mandriva themselves), Contrib (contributions by others then Mandriva), plf-free and plf-nonfree (packages that are not allowed in the distribution because of the Mandriva policy, plf-free for packages with an Open Source license, and plf-nonfree for packages with a more restricting license), and club and club commercial (only for club members).

WATCH OUT: As a beginner, you'd better not configure any source that have devel, test or cooker in the name or path. Those are sources with packages that are not yet stable and thus can bring about some frustration.

NOTE: Mandriva contains a second software packages manager, Smart. You do not really need it however the Mandriva Online system is broken in this version. Mandriva Online is supposed to indicate you whether there are updates possible for your system and lets you install them automatically. Smart gives you a solution for the broken Mandriva Online with Ksmarttray. If you install Ksmarttray and lauch it (after installation it is added to the system menu), you will see an applet appearing in the Panel. This applet will indicate you when packages should be updated. WATCH OUT: When you just install smart, it seems to be set on Cooker sources. If you leave those, you will install bad versions of software and your system will be messed up. Make sure to remove the cooker sources in smart before using it! See the description in the next tip for that. TIP: when I first installed Ksmarttray, it did not indicate that there were updates available. I removed all source media (called channels by smart) and put in new ones using easyurpmi (see above), selecting smart as core. Then after a while (smart downloaded the information about currently available software packages in the background) Ksmarttray announced me that updates are available. In order to be able to remove that wrong sources that were already present, I used smart-gui (so better install that as well). The entry added to the menu for smart-gui is called Software Installer (with the same icon as the Ksmarttray icon in the Panel). You can delete the existing channels using the Edit / Channels menu. Close smart-gui and while you are a console as root (to become root use the command su and give the root password), set the new channels with the commands from easyurpmi.

The MCC is also the place where you can amongst other tasks

• configure your hardware completely

• manage your network and Internet connections

• manage the users of the system

• add fonts (TIP: If you have installed a PC in dual boot with Windows, Mandriva will offer you a very easy way to import fonts from Windows with one single click. Windows contains some copyrighted fonts, but if you have Windows already legally installed on your system, you already have paid for the rights to use them).

• change the K Menu (menu style, menu items, etc.)

• configure and start backups (inclusive root files and files of other users)

• modify your partitions (WATCH OUT: you'd best only do this if you have sufficient knowledge about partitions, as you risk to lose all your data by making a mistake)

• activate the firewall

• choose the way the PC boots (what OS is started by default and whether Mandriva automatically logs into a certain account without password or not)

The CD & DVD Burning application is K3b (see Figure 23.: K3b). It is a very intuitive program that does its job in an excellent way (TIP: in case you would have problems, try to start K3b as root). Next to data data CD's or data DVD's, you can also use K3b to create audio CD's, video CD's or video DVD's and even eMovix CD's or DVD's. The latter is one of the may great innovations of the Open Source world: if you burn audio or video files on an eMovix CD or DVD, and you put the CD or DVD in a PC before you (re)boot it, automatically all software (under the form of a mini distribution) is started to play those files. That way you do not have to worry whether the recipient has the correct software (codecs) to play your video or audio files. If it works for you, it will work for the recipient as well!

Office:

By default the full OpenOffice.org suite is installed. For the readers that would not know this suite yet (which is also available free for Windows), it is sufficient to mention that it is a complete alternative to MS Office. For home use the functionalities and compatibility of OpenOffice.org with MS Office are certainly sufficient. The fact that OpenOffice.org allows you to create PDF files in one click is a nice add-on.

It is also OpenOffice.org that is provided for webpage creation. That might work for some users, but Nvu is better suited as web editor (also available under Windows). It can be installed easily via the MCC.

KWrite is a text editor you could compare with Notepad on Windows in the sense that it is a very light weight editor with also limited functionalities. KWrite is much more interesting for developers though as it has interesting features for indenting and color coding for scripting, XML documents, etc.

KOrganizer is a very capable calendar application:

Figure 24: KOrganizer

KPDF is a PDF viewer that works well for simply viewing PDF files. If you need more advanced features, it is quite easy to install Acrobat Reader with the Mandriva Control Center.

Up till now I never really looked at KAlarm and I'm glad that I did for writing this article. As the name says, the purpose of KAlarm is simply to set off an alarm a certain date and time. But not only can it just play a sound and show a message, it can do much more. You can also request it to run a command or send an e-mail automatically, and you can set a recurrence for it. Interesting to make your PC perform certain tasks when you are not using it (e.g. at night) for repetitive tasks (e.g. updates, backups, etc.)

KCalc is a simple calculator. Most people don't have a separate calculator device anymore, but sometimes what you need to calculate is not worth starting a full spreadsheet application.

One thing I find really lacking in the Office menu is the Desktop Search utility, Kerry (see Figure 25: Kerry Desktop Search). This as well can be added easily via the MCC, which is something I would really advise you to do. Today with the huge number of files we have on all that disk space, a desktop search utility such as Kerry can really save a lot of time. After installation, you cannot use it right away. It first needs to index all your files. That takes a bit of time and is done during time your PC is idle. It only has to do that once and will keep its index up-to-date on the go from then on. So give it a a bit of time before expecting it to return all results.

Figure 25: Kerry Desktop Search

Internet

The default webbrowser is Firefox with, of course, all the positives that Firefox offers on Windows as well. At this moment Firefox 2.0 is just out. During the creation of Mandriva 2007, it was not yet available though, so Firefox 1.5 is included. Knowing the Mandriva software policy, 2.0 will not come as an update, but maybe a package will be offered separately (for instance via the Kiosk).

Konqueror is also available as a second browser. However Konqueror is much more than an Internet browser. It is also a very capable file manager and FTP client. TIP: hitting the F9 key will activate the file manager profile of Konqueror.

Figure 26: Konqueror

NOTE: In Linux there is nothing like C:/ or D:/ drives. All is just one big directory tree (starting with the root directory: / ). What is important to you most is /home/YourUsername (in the picture above for instance that is /home/wim/, since wim is my user name). That is where all your files will be.

The standard e-mail client is Kmail. Kmail is a very complete mail client, but there is no problem for people that just have made the switch and were used to Thunderbird on Windows. Thunderbird can be easily installed via the Mandriva Control Center. It is a pity though that mail links in a webpage in Firefox are not automatically opened in Thunderbird. But this can be solved easily by the installation of the extension Hiddenprefs and in its tab settings selecting Email client to use with Firefox and introducing as path /usr/bin/mozilla-thunderbird.

The default Instant Messaging application is Kopete, which is able to communicate over multiple networks such as MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ and others. This makes it ideal to keep in touch with all your contacts even if they use different networks. It does not yet include all latest functionalities that are present in the other chat applications though (such as webcam chat).

Ekiga Softphone is a VOIP (Voice Over IP) software that allows you to place phone calls. It can also be used as videophone. It has become quite popular lately. Another very popular VOIP software package is Skype. The technology used in Skype is closed in nature. The protocol used for transmitting sound and video, is not known to anyone other then Skype, while Ekiga uses the well known SIP standard. As a result Skype is an island on its own, its servers can only be reached by Skype software. Ekiga on the other hand can talk with any server that is compatible with the SIP protocol. In case you have a lot of friends using Skype, a packaged version for Mandriva is available from the Mandriva club commercial repository. If you don't have a lot of friends using Skype yet, Ekiga is the better route (and advise any Windows friends then to use any SIP compatible client). Otherwise you will get stuck on that closed island.

The PIM (Personal Information Manager) suite is Kontact, which uses other components that were already mentioned (Kmail, KOrganizer, Kpilot) and adds some additional features (Summary overview, To-do-list, Journal, News, Notes, etc.). All in all this is a very capable PIM suite where all components interact very well. If you like a PIM suite Kontact will probably not disappoint you.

Multimedia

In the area of multimedia Mandriva offers about everything that you need. Depending on what you want to do, it might be necessary though to install some extra packages from the Penguin Liberation Front (PLF), see http://plf.zarb.org/. In some countries (e.g. the USA) there are laws that make a number of things illegal (as the viewing of commercial DVDs that are encrypted, using a player that is not licensed by the video industry). Also in some countries the possibility exists to patent software (something that is luckily not yet possible here in Europe). As a result, a number of software packages exist that are perfectly allowed in some countries and are illegal in others (like the USA). Mandriva of course makes its distribution in such a way that it can be legally distributed in the USA as well. So this means that all packages that risk to be illegal there, are not included in the distribution. And that is the reason of existence of the PLF. From a mirror (a copy of the server that offers the software) that contains the PLF RPMs, it is very easy to install these packages and complete your system.

For a full multimedia experience you should install the following packages: lame when you want to convert your Audio CD's to mp3 and libdvdcss to be able to read encrypted DVD's. We will explain further how easy this can be done with the Mandriva Control Center. NOTE: if you prefer not to do something that is potentially illegal in your country and want to keep away from the PLF, the Mandriva 2007 PowerPack version that you are entitled to as Mandriva Club member, includes now LinDVD. LinDVD is a commercial DVD player for Linux with all required licenses, and thus fully legal in all countries. This solves the DVD playing issue, but there is no solution for the MP3 encoding issue (listening to MP3s is enabled by default in Mandriva, but not encoding to MP3). As it is closed source software, LinDVD comes with a few inconveniences that one cannot reconfigure (e.g. some people have a problem with LinDVD defaulting to the wrong drive, LinDVD sets region encoding, etc.).

Playing normal audio CD's is as simple as can be. When you insert an audio CD in your computer, you get the question what you want to do with it (Open in a window, rip the tracks or play). When you select to play the CD, Mandriva automatically launches KsCD (see Figure 27.: KsCD). KsCD is doing one thing great: playing audio CDs perfectly. The only offered bonus is that KsCD can present you some information on the CD that you can find in the CD Database (CDDB) on the Internet: artist, album, names of the songs, etc.

Figure 27.: KsCD

But maybe you would like to do something else with your Audio CD. Maybe you would prefer to rip it so that you can listen to it from your portable mp3 player? No problem. There are even multiple ways to get that done.

First of all you can simply chose Extract and Encode Audio Tracks from the menu that pops up when you enter the CD. Kaudiocreator will then be started. This is a program with the sole purpose to rip audio tracks from a CD to either MP3 (you need to install lame from plf first) or OGG (open source alternative that is as good as MP3, but not recognized by as many players).

When you look at your CD in Konqueror (see Figure 28.: Audio CD in Konqueror), you will not only see the files in the actual format as they are present on the CD.

Figure 28.: Audio CD in Konqueror

You will find as well a number of (virtual) folders with the files in other formats such as Ogg Vorbis (an open alternative for mp3) or mp3. These do not really exist on the CD, but if you copy files from such a folder, Konqueror will create them at the location where you copied them (ripping the real audio files in the process). So you can attach your USB mp3 player to your PC and copy the files straight from the CD to your USB mp3 player. Difficult to imagine it easier.

Of course you can also store these files on your hard disk. In case you would like to play them, the default audio player Amarok will be started (see Figure 29.: Amarok).

Figure 29.: Amarok

Amarok is a great application for the management of your music collection. Of course you can just play your files, you can create play lists, play the files at random, etc. But next to the normal options that most music players offer, Amarok offers some nice additions:

• Your music gets sorted for you automatically. You can select whether you want this to be done on artist, album, genre, or a combination up to three different levels.

• Amarok automatically keeps track how many times you play a song, as a basis for your personal preferences list. So the more you use Amarok, the better it learns your preferences and the better it will be able to take them into account if you so wish.

• Amarok can download automatically an image of the cover, so that you can also easily recognize the album or song visually.

• You like to follow the lyrics? No problem, Amarok will fetch them for you from the Internet.

• Want to know more about the artist? Then Amarok consults the wikipedia to present you with an article about that topic.

• The management of the mp3 id tags is dead easy with Amarok. Amarok downloads the information and proposes it to you, but you can adapt the tags yourself as well whenever you like. This helps then again for the sorting of the songs.

• In the version included in Mandriva 2007 there is the possibility to enhance the Amarok functionalities by adding scripts via a very easy to use script manager that allows you to select and add script automatically from the Internet.

If you put a DVD in your PC, then nothing happens. If you have installed the libdvdcss2, the default media player Kmplayer will be started automatically. Kaffeine is another media player (you always have the choice when you run Linux), that can also play video (CDs, DVDs, VCDs., AVI, MOV, WMV, but also streaming multimedia that is streamed over the Internet).

Oh, yeah. For the people who find this important: if you play DVD's with libdvdcss2, you don't have to bother about regions. It even seems that audio CD's that were protected against copying and that you cannot play under Windows, can be played without problem under Linux.

For video editing, no application is installed by default. But via the MCC, you can install several. There are several video editing applications for Linux, and what is best suited will depend on your needs. If you would like to do some simple video editing on material from your digital video camera, I would for the moment still advice you to install Kino and Kino-plugins. Kino is also a non-linear video editor and is quite complete. Maybe the look & feel is not so great, but for home videos it offers about all that you need. You can use it to import your video from the camera via Firewire (=IEEE 1394). You can control your camera from within Kino. After importing the video, you can quite easily edit your video (cut, move and copy scenes, etc.) and apply some effects (as well on the video itself as on the audio. You can also add titles. When you are finally satisfied with the result, you can export the result to a whole bunch of formats (back onto the camera if it has that capability, VCD, SVCD, DVD, DiVX, etc.). If you really want a package with a very large set of features (picture in picture, keyframing, etc.) for professional grade results, you can use Cinelerra. However then you should be prepared to invest quite some time in getting to know it, because Cinelerra has quite a steep learning curve.

The default photo management application is Digikam. It makes it really easy to import your photos from the camera. There even is support for raw formats (which allows you to adapt the white balance before converting to another format). After that, you can put your photos in albums. Digikam will then include a lot of photo editing possibilities: rotation, mirroring, color optimization, red eye removal, scaling, cropping, etc.). Tagging your photos allows you to find very fast a specific photo. To really get the most out of Digikam, you should install the kipi-plugins. You can export a selection of photos (possibly based on tags) to HTML (for the publication on a web page) or to CD/DVD, create your own calendar, make a dia slide show from your photos, apply batch modifications on a bunch of photo's, etc..

Although Digikam alreadyallows you to do a lot, you might want to really be creative with your collection once in a while. If you then would like to paste pieces of one photo into another, Digikam will not be sufficient. Then you can use the GIMP, which is included as Image editor. The GIMP is a very powerful bitmap manipulation program. Summing up all the possibilities of the GIMP would constitute an article on itself (or even a series). So let's limit us for now to mention that before you are confronted with the limitations of the GIMP, you have been able to do some incredible stuff. For bitmap manipulations Adobe Photoshop counts as the reference. The GIMP really is up to standard compared to Photoshop and thus fulfills largely the needs of anyone but those who really have very high professional requirements.

Although there is very little that the GIMP does not allow you to do with regards to bitmap manipulation, sometimes you still need something different. Bitmap images such as photos just do not scale up very well. So if you need images that should be able to scale well (e.g. for logos), or from which you need several variations, then you benefit a lot from using vector drawings. For vector drawings you can install Inkscape. Inkscape is again a very powerful tool, and you can use the clipart from the Openclipart (http://www.openclipart.org/) project to get started with, so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Other applications

As mentioned, there is an enormous amount of applications that you can add for free. This section gives a small overview of a number of them that might be important to you.

GnuCash and KmyMoney are applications for finance management. They can be used as well by small companies as by individuals. They allow you to follow up all your incomes and expenses and to perform financial planning. These applications are so complete for the individual, that the learning curve might be quite steep and frightening. But the one who wants a thorough financial management, has a great tool here.

Via the MCC one can with a few clicks add a few hundred games amongst which Battle of Wesnoth, Flightgear (Flight Simulator) and FreeCIV, which have received very good user reviews. It is said that although they cannot yet compete with the newest (and expensive) commercial games, they start to come close. We haven't tried them ourselves yet.

For younger children the packages GCompris and Childsplay are really recommendable. Although they have an educative nature, they seem to attract the attention of at least our children, as they ask for it without any hint from our side. Also games like Supertux are favored a lot.

And when speaking about games, you probably have some Windows games lying around. There is no guarantee that this will work, but some windows games (or other windows applications) can run under Linux There are a number of options. The version for club members comes with Cedega, which is specialized for gamers. The club members even get access to a commercial game with it: the racing game Flatout. Normally you pay 5$ per month for Cedega (not including the games themselves of course). You can find more information on their website: http://www.transgaming.com, including ratings on how well certain games are supported by Cedega.

Wine is the open source framework upon which the commercial products Cedega and Crossover Office have been based. It has been under development for a long time, during which it was difficult to use. The version that you can install on Mandriva 2007 however, comes with a graphical configuration module that allows much easier installation of Windows applications. Don't expect every windows application to work and some do only work partially. But other windows applications can be made to run just fine in Mandriva Linux. To do so, install wine and xwine. No icon is added to the Menu, but you can easily do that yourself, the only thing you have to know is that you should enter for the command xwine. Giving the command xwine from a command prompt will run the wine configurator as well. More information on Wine can be found on http://www.winehq.org/

Crossover Office is then again specialized in running Windows office applications on Linux (the MS Office products, some browser plugins, etc.). For more information, see http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/.

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License

This work is governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. In order to obtain a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

The author to be credited is Wim Coulier (website: coulier.org).

English translation polished by John Barron (http://www.europa.demon.co.uk/)