[ubuntu-uk] Software choices

[chombee]

On Thu, 2006-12-28 at 15:14 +0000, Dave Briggs wrote:
> Thanks for all the help getting the web working, guys. This is my first
> email that's sent from Evolution - it's quite nice, I have to say!

Welcome! :)

> 1) Do I need to install any anti-virus/malware or firewall software on
> Ubuntu?

Short answer: No. I never use any. I've been using Ubuntu since day one
and Linux even longer than that, and have never seen a virus, spyware
etc. Never heard of anyone having one either. That's not to say they
don't exist, but they're extremely rare. Rare enough not to worry about
for a personal computer IMHO.

There is anti-virus and firewall software available if you want to be
really secure though. Someone else will have to give you specific
recommendations.

> 2) I have F-Spot preinstalled, but is there a better photo manager
> available? I'm sure I've read somewhere that there is one out there that
> can send photos to Flickr - that would be cool.

I believe f-spot can do that. There is also GThumb installed with
Ubuntu, a venerable old program, not as cool as f-spot, but works. I had
a Windows convert recently who did a lot of photography and found f-spot
wasn't up to his standards. He was used to Apple's iPhoto or iView or
whatever. I  told him to install Google's Picasa and he was happy with
that. I have to admit, though not free software, Picasa is very, very
good, and much better than f-spot. Picasa is on version 2.0 while f-spot
is at about 0.2, so it's hardly surprising. F-spot will catch up.

Anyway you download Picasa for Linux here:
http://picasa.google.com/linux/ You want the 'Free Download (.deb) - for
Debian/Ubuntu x86' version from the download page, which you can install
on Ubuntu by double-clicking it.

> 3) Is there any problem with running KDE apps on Gnome in Ubuntu? Does
> it lose performance or crash?

They work fine performance and reliability wise. The fonts and icons
don't look quite as nice as they do in KDE, or as GNOME apps do in
GNOME, I think. And if you install a KDE app, it will often install a
lot of KDE libraries that it needs instead of just using the available
GNOME libraries as a GNOME app would, adding a bit of bloat, though you
won't notice any effect from this unless you have really low disk space
or something.

> 4) Can anyone recommend an offline blog editor and RSS aggregator?

Blog editors: BloGTK http://blogtk.sourceforge.net/ , Drivel
http://www.dropline.net/drivel/ , and others, but this really depends
what blog software or site you're using.

RSS: Liferea is probably the best or at least most obvious choice
http://liferea.sourceforge.net/ , also good are Blam
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/blam ,RSSOwl
http://www.rssowl.org/ (impressive feature list), Straw
http://www.gnome.org/projects/straw/ and YARSSR
http://yarssr.sourceforge.net/ , and there are many more too.

All of those should be installable via Applications->Add/Remove or
System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu.

A great site if you are looking for GTK/GNOME applications is
http://www.gnomefiles.org/

-- 
chombee at nerdshack.com