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5 Essential Linux Applications
Internet suite - Netscape Communicator Although Star Office does have browsing, email and news client capabilities, it is safe to say that Netscape is still the standard when it comes to internet browsers. Internet Explorer may be a good browser but there is no version for Linux, therefore is of no interest for this article. Actually Netscape does have versions of Communicator for many more platforms then Microsoft has for Internet Explorer. This is rather interesting since, as mentioned before, this is also the case for Star Office vs. MS Office. Multi-platform is defenitively a good thing. If you coming from a windows or mac environment, there isn't much difference in Netscape Communicator for Linux: there is the Navigator web browser, Messenger email and news client and Composer web page editor. The advantage in using an integrated browser/mail/news client is that the netscape engine which renders html is the same engine for both the email and news client, therefore giving embeded html in email and news messages the same look as in the web browser. This is true for other computer platforms as well, not only Linux. From the major latest Linux distributions, I do not know one which doesn't have Netscape Communicator or Navigator installed as the default browser. For more information on Netscape Communicator or to download the latest version go to: http://www.netscape.com. Messaging and Chat Clients - Various The internet is all about communication or exchange of information. Real time communication in the internet has been around for a long time. IRC, which stands for Internet Relay Chat, is probably one of the oldest and most well known ways of chating with people all over the world in real time. Lately instant messaging has become extremely popular as well, with ICQ and AIM being the most popular standards. ICQ is another way of pronouncing "I seek you" and AIM simple stands for AOL Instant Messenger. Interesting to note that ICQ now belongs to AOL. IRC clients in Linux are available in console mode and x-windows mode. The most popular IRC clients in console mode are perhaps IRCII and BitchX. Your mileage may vary here in which is included with your distribution. Linux-Mandrake comes with BitchX but no IRCII. X IRC clients will vary depending on which desktop environment is being used. In gnome there is X-chat, in KDE there is Kvirc. These aren't the only IRC clients available: go to a Linux applications site and do a search for IRC to find many more IRC clients, in case you don't like the ones available with your distribution. Instant messaging clients are a bit different since there are 2 choices of which protocol to use. Since I don't really use instant messaging, I am not to sure of which client come with which distro. I have done some looking around software sites and found plenty of stuff. Use one of the links below to find more chat applications. Keep in mind what enviromnent these programs will work on and wich libraries they may need. Gnome uses Gtk+ libraries, KDE uses QT libraries. Tcl/Tk libraries are usually present in most Linux Distributions. 
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