Gnome Applications and Utilities

These include office and productivity applications such as

• Gnumeric — a full-featured Excel-compatible spreadsheet

• AbiWord — a lightweight word processing application

• Gnome Calendar to help you manage your busy schedule

• Several text editors, from simple and easy to use gedit to the (arguably) the most powerful text editor ever created, Emacs (which is not a Gnome appication)

• Gimp — image editing program for power users; rivals Photoshop

• Image viewers such as Eye of Gnome, GQview and xv

Among other things, here you will find

• Calculator

• Gnome Search tool which you can use to find a file on your system

• gfloppy for formatting floppy disks

• GDictfor looking up a word in one of the many dictionaries freely available on the Internet

Here you will find CD player, Mixer (which also can be used to adjust volume of your speakers), and an MP3 player XMMS.

This submenu contains utilities for managing your system. You can find out detailed information about your processor, memory, and operating system using System Info, check how much space you have left on your disks using Gnome DiskFree, or view all the processes (jobs) which are currently running on your computer using System monitor. In addition, System monitor also shows you load level for the processor and memory, and allows you to kill a stalled or otherwise unwanted job.

This submenu also contains tools for managing software installed on your system, namely GnoRPM and Helix Gnome Update (if you are using the distribution of Gnome prepared by Helix Code, Inc.). GnoRPM allows you to view all software packages installed on your system (if you are using a distribution of Linux based on RPM packages, such as Red Hat, SuSe, or Mandrake); it also allows you to remove, update, or install new packages. Helix Gnome Update provides an extremely easy, almost one-click, way to update your Gnome installation. Both of these utilities , however, require that you have system administrator (root) privileges.

And finally, the same submenu also contains various terminal emulators (xterm, Color xterm, Gnome Terminal) letting you use the most powerful (although not most user friendly) interface ever created — the command line prompt.

Here, you will find Netscape web browser, X-Chat for Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Gnome-ICU for talking with other people using ICQ protocol, and gftp which is a graphical tool for FTP file transfers. Note that Gnome file manager, Nautilus, also has built-in FTP capabilities, so gftp is needed only in those rare cases when you need something really complicated (for example, transferring files using secure version of FTP, based on ssh).

Lots of them — just try!