Beginning Fedora 2

This chapter touched on a variety of applications installed by default in Fedora. In some cases, we discussed how they can be extended to provide further functionality. In fact, there are thousands of quality applications that are available either within the Fedora distribution or via the Internet, in some cases freeware thanks to the Open Source Foundation and the GNU Project. In other cases, shareware is available at a small cost, again via the Internet.

The chapter started by covering the OpenOffice suite of applications commonly used for office productivity. We touched on a couple of Internet applicationsthe Mozilla browser and the Gaim Instant Messenger applicationand the Evolution personal information management tool. We skipped through a number of multimedia applications, which provided various audio and graphical facilities, and took a look at some of the more essential system toolsthe gedit text editor, the Nautilus file manager, the File Roller compression tool, and the VMWare emulator.

There is such a wealth of functionality available that you shouldnt have trouble finding the application you need to do the job you want, whether its included in the Fedora distribution or on the Internet somewhere. And if theres nothing out there that fits your requirements, you can always start off your own open source project. In the end, you can achieve in Linux everything that youd expect to be able to achieve on other platforms.