Chapter 9: Gnowing GNOME
Chapter 10: Gnowing More Applications
Chapter 11: Surfin’ the Net and Groovin’ to Tunes
Chapter 12: Live from the Net
Chapter 13: Going to the Office
Chapter 14: Days of Wine and Applications
One thing you can do with your computer is put up your feet and wait for the screen saver to kick in. You can confide to all your friends at the next party you attend that you have a “Red Hat Linux box.” (That will make you popular as they clamor to know when your stock options will mature.) Or, you can use your new Red Hat Linux workstation to get things done.
To that end, Chapter 9 introduces the friendly world of the GNOME windows environment. GNOME, a friendly li’l guy who likes to put a friendly face on Linux, can help you set up the “look and feel” of Linux so that you feel comfortable and at home. Chapter 10 goes further and introduces cool things you can do with GNOME applications.
In Chapter 11, the fun starts. Can you say “Par-tay”? (Sorry.) Find out how to use the Mozilla browser and how to use multimedia players to listen to audio CDs and Ogg or MP3 files. We show you how to record music from CDs and how to become your own recording studio by recording audio (and data, if you’re a nerd) to CD.
Chapter 12 takes the audio thing one step further. It describes how to use the open source multimedia players XMMS and MPlayer to listen to flowing streams — no, not water streams, but, rather, audio and video streams flowing from the Internet. You can listen to radio and audio clips and watch video too. With this knowledge, you never have to leave your couch again.
Lucky Chapter 13 describes how to get work done with OpenOffice. Sorry — reality bites and personal productivity suites (word processors and spreadsheets, for example) are a necessary evil. Gotta make the doughnuts.
Chapter 14 describes how to use WINE and VMware. The WINE system lets you run Windows applications, like Word 2000, directly from your Linux workstation! VMware creates virtual computers that run both Windows and Linux.