KDE Edutainment by Donald Emmack was reprinted from TUX Magazine issue number 17

Many Linux users are savvy game experts. So, although computer games can be purely for fun, they also can train your mind. KDE's Edutainment suite is proof of that. The suite of packages lets users learn and have fun at the same time.

The Edutainment suite includes more than 15 packages, ranging from plain-old Hangman to Latin. Each of the packages within the KDE Edutainment Project targets children ages 3 to 18. Although most of the packages within the suite have a user interface suitable for school-age children, this is not true for complex training aids like Kalzium. Kalzium is a training tool for the periodic table of elements—nothing makes that simple!

You have seen many TUX stickers on the web, but I am sure you've never seen anything like this before:

The best part is yet to come: you can have these stickers for free!

All you have to do is run to the post office and send us a postage-paid, self-addressed envelope:

TUX Magazine
PO BOX 980985
Houston, TX 77098
USA

For additional information about sending postage-paid envelopes internationally, please refer to our FAQ

Google mail, gmail, is a web-based email system. I have hated web-based email systems for many, many years. That said, I am going to confess that I actually like gmail. No, I don't love it but I do like it.

Most web mail applications are pretty much the same. You see some message titles and from addresses, you can view, delete, respond or save in another folder. You have some limited amount of storage for your messages and when you run out you need to clean up your mess.

Some are prettier, some allow you to do things to multiple message at a time and some are more configurable. But, they just don't present anything radically different. In fact, they convinced me there really wasn't room for anything radically different until I started using gmail.

Phil Hughes writes:

The idea of TUX is about two years old. In those two years, we have proved that:

• Linux is ready for the desktop.
• People using or wanting to use desktop Linux are ready for TUX.

Our initial vision was to bring useful how-to information to the new Linux user. If anything, that readership vision has expanded to include people who, although they may have used Linux, are new to desktop Linux and/or are new to using a graphical user interface with Linux on the desktop.

Scribus In-Depth Tutorial by Donald Emmack was reprinted from TUX Magazine issue number 16

In the May 2006 issue of TUX, I covered the basics of newsletter creation with Scribus. In this follow-up article, I dig deeper into Scribus and choose a couple topics to explore further. The last article attracted good publicity for this powerful desktop publishing program (DTP). So, based on that input, I decided to focus on the most frequent requests: fonts and PDF creation. Many personal and business users rely on .pdf files for document exchange. So, with this follow-up article, I take a detailed look at Scribus' portable document format (PDF) generation and ways to add fancy fonts to your publications. Choosing features to cover was a tough job, because Scribus has so many features. Fortunately, TUX readers sent in responses to suggest more topics for Scribus.

K Input/Output libraries, or kioslaves, are favorite features for most new KDE and Linux users.  Reprinted from TUX Magazine issue number 14

In the course of my day, I generally use a wide variety of desktop environments.  Although I spend most of my time in KDE, I do use GNOME, Microsoft Windows and Apple's OS X on an almost daily basis.  When using these other environments, I realize just how much I've come to depend on Konqueror to simplify my work flow.  I try to type fish:/ URLs into Apple's Finder.  I am momentarily confused when a quick Alt-F2 media:/ fails to work as expected in GNOME.  I feel downright lost in Windows without help:/.  I guess I need to accept the fact that I'm addicted to KIO.

I was cleaning up my office—a euphemism for moving the junk around but never getting rid of anything—yesterday and ran across my old laptop bag. Ok, let's be honest—it's a backpack. It has padding on one side that is about the size of my current laptop.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I mean to help those of you that will be taking charge of your computers. The first task I'd like to help with is choosing applications for your computer. As I mentioned in the introduction to this series, let us not forget that it might be easier for you to just accept the choices made by others. If you'd rather not deal with all of the hassles, then maybe you should just stick with Linspire or Xandros. If you do, however, you might miss out on a wealth of software available that could help you get more out of your computer.

Later on in this first series of articles, I'll get into rules of thumb you can use to make your choices, but first let's review web destinations that might help you make your choices. These web sites all offer volumes of information about hundreds of thousands of projects. That said, let's review quickly the relationship between an open source software project and software. You should always remember that behind every free and open source software package, there is a community. These communities vary wildly in size, but in general consist of developers and users. These communities use some of the sites, besides their own home pages, to announce and even build their software. The five sites I find interesting are Freshmeat.net, SourceForge.net, swik.net, openbrr.org, and ohloh.com. Let's first start with (in order of age of the Internet)...