KDE 3.1

I'm a fan of KDE, for my normal desktop and the 3.1 version included in SuSE worked well. It's sporting a light blue background theme and the new artsy (kind of fuzzy) type icons. Also, most buttons now have rounded edges and a 3-dimensional look to them. Another feature that shows up in KDE 3.1 is desktop sharing. The Melbourne Linux User Group runs desktop sharing now, in addition to audio streaming and IRC during their regular Tueday night meetings. Remote meeting attendees can now see what is being discussed, just like sitting in the audience eye-balling it first hand. And, it worked just fine on my home network, between the 133 Mhz Pentium and my laptop. Response was good, even though my laptop was on a wireless link.

Sometimes I like to boot up a machine (particularly my laptop) and run FVWM2, especially when I'm in a big hurry and need to do a little job. For those of you into minimal desktops, total time to start for FVWM2 was 10 seconds. Also, FVWM2 has a neat little utility to help with configuration. I made sure FVWM2 was included during installation.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org 1.0.2 is now installed by default when you choose "Office Applications" during installation. OpenOffice.org is the StarOffice clone that has word-processing, spreadsheet, graphics, and presentation functions in an easy to use package. I use OpenOffice for many of my documentation jobs, including resumes, business letters, spreadsheets and slideshows.

Gnucash

Gnucash is a checkbook management system. It's similar to other money management packages in the Windows world like Quicken and MoneyCounts. The program is pretty simple to start and goes through a basic setup routine to establish accounts. Once that is done it's possible to perform normal financial accounting functions. See Figure 2 for a look at its interface.

MainActor

MainActor is a video editing program. I was able to start the application. I also tried to paste in an AVI file to the time-line, but didn't have any luck. I could paste in some jpegs and the program would step through the time-line during a preview, without trouble. The reader will have to try it out on their own equipment because in this instance, I just don't think the 133 Pentium was completely up to the task. See Figure 3 for a screenshot of MainActor and Figure 4 for a screenshot of the MainActor sequencer.

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