The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 10 (GNOME)

The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you! 1 Preliminary Note To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the Fedora 10 desktop to have the following software installed: Graphics: The GIMP - free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop F-Spot - full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop Google Picasa - application for organizing and editing digital photos Internet: Firefox Opera Flash Player 9 FileZilla - multithreaded FTP client Thunderbird - email and news client Evolution - combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions aMule - P2P file sharing application Azureus/Vuze - Java Bittorrent client Transmission BitTorrent client Pidgin- multi-platform instant messaging client (formerly known as Gaim) Skype Google Earth Xchat IRC - IRC client Office: OpenOffice Writer - replacement for Microsoft Word OpenOffice Calc - replacement for Microsoft Excel Adobe Reader GnuCash - double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken Scribus - open source desktop publishing (DTP) application Sound & Video: Amarok - audio player Audacity - free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor Banshee - audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods MPlayer - media player (video/audio), supports WMA Rhythmbox Music Player - audio player, similar to Apple's iTunes, with support for iPods gtkPod - software similar to Apple's iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini XMMS - audio player similar to Winamp dvd::rip - full featured DVD copy program Kino - free digital video editor Sound Juicer CD Extractor - CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs VLC Media Player - media player (video/audio) Real Player Totem - media player (video/audio) Xine - media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs Brasero - CD/DVD burning program K3B - CD/DVD burning program Multimedia-Codecs Programming: Kompozer - WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver, but not as feature-rich (yet) Bluefish - text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages Quanta Plus - web development environment, including a WYSIWYG editor Other: VMware Server - lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don't have to entirely abandon Windows TrueType fonts Java Read/Write support for NTFS partitions You might notice that I'm installing lots of similar applications here (e.g. two browsers and two email clients, multiple audio players, etc.) - this is just a choice. Of course you are free to install just the apps that you really need - just leave out the other ones. I will use the GNOME desktop in rhis article. I will use the username falko in this tutorial, and I will download all necessary files to falko's download which is equivalent to the directory /home/falko/Download. If you use another username (which you most probably do ;-)), please replace falko with your own username. So when I use a command like $url[http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-desktop-fedora-10,continua...]