Initially I was confused about which flavor of Linux to install as there were so many versions.
Finally I settled down on Opens-Suse distribution as this flavour of Linux is used in my organization and hence it will help me in upgrading my skill. As I wanted my transition from Windows to Linux to be smooth hence I began installing the basic applications I will be requiring.
To begin with I installed the following applications:
- Thunderbird Email Client : I wanted this so that I need not always go to the website and enter my credentials to see my mail. The installation was smooth. It was also very simple to configure Thunderbird to retrieve mail from my Google mailbox. You just had to supply your email ID and password and ZAP !!! your Thunderbird is configured to retrieve email from the mailbox.
- Skype : Like Thunderbird, Skype installation was also very easy. You just had to download the rpm file from the Skype website. Right click on the rpm file and select “Open With>KPackageKit”.After entering the the root password it will begin with the installation.
- Firefox 8 : With my default Open Suse Installation, I had got Firefox 4. However there was an update available on the Mozilla Website and I decided that I will update my Firefox. I started downloading the tar files from the website however they were precompiled binaries and I had to always run firefox from command line specifying the correct path of the folder where the binary was stored. Then I googled the net and this is what I found. A btter procedure would be as follows by, run the following command on Terminal
- zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla:/beta/openSUSE_11.4/mozilla:beta.repo
- zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.4/mozilla.repo
- zypper install MozillaFirefox-8.0-2.1.i586
These were a few applications I installed initially.
Journey To The Open Source World 