Now that the horrors of installation and setup are a part of the past I have been spending my time delving deep into the desktop and the applications. I would like to briefly touch upon three of these.
Alien
One of the first things you figure out after you install your distribution of choice is what package manager they are using. Now I’m not talking about Synaptic, mintInstall, or KPackageKit, but rather the packaging format, commonly RPM or DEB. While both of these are excellent they do create problems when you want to install software that only comes in the format that your distribution does not use. This is where alien comes in. Alien is a small command line program that will convert from one package to the other. So I can download a .deb file and use alien to convert it into Fedora’s native .rpm format. It’s simple and works great.
OpenPGP
As I am a bit of a privacy nut I have been using Pretty Good Privacy for a while now to secure my e-mail and attachments. My mail client of choice makes this very easy through the use of the Enigmail add-on. What’s even better is Fedora, like most if not all Linux distributions, already ships with the program gpg. GnuPG is a command line application that implements OpenPGP, the open source, fully compatible version of PGP. This means that no matter which program you are using on your system they can all access the same PGP keys seamlessly! I have taken the extra step of generating a GPG key for my e-mail account here, tyler at thelinuxexperiment.com, which you can find under my page (under Guinea Pigs at the top). I highly recommend anyone who is the least bit computer savvy set themselves up an key and upload it to a key server. It takes about 1 minute and is very easy to use!
Wine
Wine, or Wine Is Not an Emulator, is a Linux program that can run a lot of Window’s programs by tricking them into thinking they are running on a Window’s machine. While I wouldn’t recommend it for everything, Wine is quite powerful and can get you out of a pinch. You can run Windows programs simply by opening a terminal and typing
wine [path to exe]
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