or "How Do I Enter That Accent on Your Name?"

Being a guy with an accent on one of the letters of his name, you can imagine that I probably spend a lot of time entering so-called "special characters" in my documents and e-mails. Short of keeping a document with these letters already written, then copying, and pasting them, entering an é can be amazingly time consuming. Worst of all, while OpenOffice.org lets me click Insert, Special Character to select from a list, not all applications have a handy list of characters to choose from. For everyone out there who routinely has to enter special characters or letters with accents, I'm going to give you a great KDE trick to use that will ease the pain.

by Jon Biddell

One of the guys I work with saw me running Libranet on my workstation the other day and said “I bet you need an Engineering Degree to install software on that sucker

by Lew Pitcher

Editor's note : Following Jon Biddell's praise for Libranet, two more people immediately came forward to champion their distro of choice, both carrying the Slackware banner and both for somewhat different reasons. Let's start with Lew Pitcher's answer to the call.

Well, Marcel, that's some gauntlet you threw down, asking for people to champion their distribution of choice. I'm no Lancelot, but I'll certainly carry the banner for Slackware. So let's get to it....

A week before Christmas, in a fit of panic, I decided to buy a DVD writer so that I could transfer the movies I made, of my now five month old son, onto DVDs to give to our parents and other family members. Yeah, I know . . . but new parents are like that. Anyhow, I headed out to the local Future Shop more or less blindly trusting that whatever I bought would just work on my Linux system. After a few minutes of hemming and hawing, I settled on a BenQ model DW1620. Here's how it went.

by Gar Nelson.

So you have your new installation of Fedora up and running and so far you're quite happy with the results. Then you decide that it's time to start installing some new programs. So how do you add in new packages, or remove packages you don't need?

By Marcel Gommans

If you are looking for an easy to use program to listen to your favorite CDs then you should try KsCD. KsCD comes with KDE and if you use that window environment it will most likely be installed by default. You can find it in the Kicker menu under 'Multimedia'.

Let's jump right in and see how it works now.

By Michael "Stibbs" Stibane

Late, budget conscious, and in a panic to get those Christmas cards out? Read Michael Stibbs' article and you can take care of all those cards in just a few minutes without spending a penny.

Did you, like me, forget to buy greeting cards in the midst and stress of the few weeks leading up to Christmas? If so, we have to come up with a quick solution. There are just four days left. I create my own cards with Scribus, a top-notch Linux desktop publishing package (DTP) and send them as PDF by email or printed and sent by regular mail.

Oh the weather outside is freezing, but the warmth from your monitor is making it feel like you are in the tropics. Christmas is coming up fast and this blaze of heat is making it difficult for you to get into the spirit of uncontrollable shopping madness. The clock is ticking and you're still at the keyboard looking for inspiration. Well, everyone, I've got just what you need.

This is the first in a series that is going to cover the installation of sofware packages under Linux. I'm going to jump right into this article by telling you that, for the most part, you won't need to be building packages from source. You can, but you generally don't need to.

The average Linux distribution CD comes with several gigabytes of software. SUSE, for one, delivers several CDs in a boxed set with enough software to keep you busy for weeks, maybe months. I'll tell you how to install that software, easily and without fuss. Despite all that your distribution has to offer, sooner or later you will find yourself visiting various Internet sites, looking for new and updated software. Where will you find this stuff, and will installing be the same as getting it from your CDs?

For new Linux users, the hardest thing can be trying to get an answer to one simple question: "Which Linux distribution should I use?" Back in the world of that other OS, the choice is pretty simple since you had no choice, or as Henry Ford might have put it, you can have "any color you want as long as it's black". In the Linux world, you can get black, yellow, red, blue, green, and every color in between. I personally think it is a wonderful thing that so many Linux distributions exist. Aside from creating a rich OS landscape, it furthers creativity and fosters innovation in software design. This can only be a good thing. While this makes for a colorful world, it can be very confusing for the new user. The DistroWatch Web site alone lists over 350 Linux distributions.

So which distribution should you get? Well, every Linux vendor does things a little differently. If you think of this in terms of cars, it starts to make sense. Every single car out there is basically an engine on wheels with seats and some kind of steering mechanism so that drivers can get to where they want to go. What kind of car you buy depends on what else you expect from a car, whether that is comfort, style, the vendor's reputation, or any great number of other choices.

If you've come this far and you are reading what I'm writing here, then you probably want me to do what no sane person is willing to do, go out on a limb, take sides, and recommend something. All right, here goes . . . but I'm going start by dividing all of you into two groups.

Those of you in the first group haven't yet decided whether they are ready to give up on Windows. You know it's a good idea and you're going to switch at some point soon, but you would like to try Linux without having to actually commit to anything. For you, I'm going to recommend Knoppix, a wonderful Linux distribution that runs entirely from the CD without the need to install. There are other so-called live CDs out there (and I invite you to try others) but Knoppix is a great place to start. Download and burn a copy or pick up the first issue of TUX which will include a special version of Knoppix, remastered to include all of the software we are covering in the first issue.