Firstly, there is probably lots of software on the Mandriva CDs or DVD, that wasn't installed by default. If you find you need some extra software, it's well worth checking if you've already got it, before you start searching for downloads.
To check what's already available, you can run the install program from the menu (you don't need your CDs / DVD just yet, as the
index of available software is stored locally). Just select System - Configuration - Packaging - Install software from the menu, and
then enter the root password at the prompt. You can then search for words in the descriptions, or just the names, and
see details for each package. To install, simply select the checkbox for the package(s) you want, approve the dependencies, and hit
'Install'. Then you'll need to insert the appropriate CD(s) / DVD to get the code.
If the software isn't already on your install media, you'll need to download the extra packages yourself. Best of all you'll get
an rpm package, which should get painlessly installed into your Mandriva system. Worst of all you'll end up having
to compile your own binaries from source code, which is probably best avoided if at all possible.
Apparently the absolute best-ever method of getting rpms is via a tool called easyurpmi (I know, catchy name).
According to Rob at "Mandrake Tips 4 Free":
"Urpmi combined with easyurpmi.zarb.org is what makes life with Mdv fun."Once this is all set up correctly (making sure the repositories you've selected correspond exactly to your Mandriva version), you
can search for and install new rpms and all their dependencies automatically with a single urpmi command. Easy.
See the internet section for details of setting this up, or see the links below for more information.
For those without a direct internet connection (but with an indirect one), it's still quite easy to manually download the packages and install them. It only gets a little bit more complicated when the rpms have dependencies, and then you have to search for those packages as well before the one you want will install.
A simple internet search will often yield useful results (eg searching for "dict rpm mandrake"), but there are specialist sites which do the job much better - see rpm.pbone.net and rpmseek.com. Make sure the URLs correspond to the correct version of the package you want (eg official, 10.2, i586), as there can be several different varieties available.
Mandriva already came with Gimp 2.2, which has better vector support than 2.0 but still surprisingly weak. So, on the hunt for a good vector tool I came across a great one called Inkscape, which was installed straight away with an 10MB rpm from the inkscape download page. Works really well so far, saving the files as XML-based SVG format, although the export to png or gif is producing surprisingly large files. Gimp can reduce them quite a bit but this shouldn't be a two-step process. There's quite possibly an Inkscape option somewhere to help optimise this.
Surely not another browser, on top of Konqueror, Mozilla, Firefox and Lynx? Well, yes. I also installed Opera 8.5, from the 4MB rpm from their site, which was again a painless install. The cost-free version used to display adverts in the browser itself unless you paid to register, but as of version 8.5 this is no longer the case. It is still closed-source, but it works great and allows you to test web pages to see if they display correctly in Opera as well, for those who want to use it.
I also wanted to have an English dictionary available offline, and a German<->English lookup as well - and this led me to the tool
kdict, which I found was already installed with Mandriva. Perfect, except that's only the client, and connects by default to
an internet-based dictionary server. A bit more hunting later, and I found rpms for a server which I can run locally, to look in the
locally-downloaded dictionary files. With rpms for dictd, dictd-server, dictd-utils and a few
dictionary rpms, I was ready to go, except for an amusing circular dependency problem: you can't install dictd unless
dictd-server is already installed. You can't install that unless dictd-dictionaries is already there, and you
can't install the dictionaries (which provide the dependency dictd-dictionaries) unless dictd is already installed!
Yay!
The solution was eventually found, to run the command urpmi to install all three at once, so the dependencies can be
simultaneously satisfied. (Incidentally, I didn't think I had the urpmi tool because unless you're root, it says that the
command can't be found! Not "you're not authorised to run this command", but "urpmi: command not found". Confusing.
Apparently root has /usr/sbin/ in its $PATH, but my user doesn't.)
Anyway, now as long as the dictionary server is running, which it seems to by default now, and kdict is told to ask localhost instead of the internet, you can look up words in all three dictionaries at once very quickly. The only snag is that the translation dictionary files don't always make sense, for example the word "gehen" gives the following:
where the funny characters in the pronunciation description are undisplayable Unicode and the funny format of the translation is because the entries "gone}" and "to go {went" have found their way into the English dictionary. Hence you can't look up "to go" as an English verb because it's not there, but if you look up "to go went" then it finds the entry for "gehen". I've contacted freedict.de for advice but not got any reply so far - updates seem to have stalled sometime in 2002.
Update: I found another translation program called ding with its own GUI and its own dictionary (from which the freedict.de ones were created) - it needs the packages tcl and tk to be installed first but then runs nicely and provides lots of verb conjugations which is much better than just a simple translation.
Both dict and ding both suffer from the Umlaut problem, whereby the German letters ö, ü and ä are all displayed wrongly and you can't lookup any of these words for the same reason.
hugin is a photo-stitcher application, itself a modest rpm but also requiring libpano12
and a selection of wxgtk libraries. It also says that enblend is optional, but if you want smoothed joins between photos
rather than obvious, hard lines, then you need the enblend rpm as well.
The tutorials at the hugin website make things fairly straightforward, although a few things weren't obvious at
first. Firstly make sure the 'yaw' settings for each photo are correct- reckon on around 20 degrees of yaw between each shot.
Make sure you press the 'Add' button to add the control points, don't just click another pair. The 'Add' button isn't too
obvious but very necessary! Make sure the stitching engine is set to "nona", and if you want to use
enblend then make sure you output to TIFF format and select the checkbox "Soft Blending".
The real bonus with hugin is the ability to stitch together rectangular panoramas, rather than just linear ones. That
means you can take for example 6 photos in a 3x2 grid and get a really effective panoramic picture, rather than one long skinny 6-in-a-row strip.
GpsPrune is the one-stop point-and-click shop for editing and visualising your GPS data on linux. But of course I would say that because GpsPrune comes from the activityworkshop :) It requires java, and uses gpsbabel to extract data from your GPS receiver, or it loads your data directly from file in text, csv, GPX, KML, KMZ or NMEA format. You can edit your data, step through point by point, delete bits you don't want, visualize in 3d, export for rendering in povray, correlate your photos, save the coordinates into the jpegs using exiftool, export thumbnails to KMZ format, plot charts using gnuplot, and many other fun things.
Here are some recommended applications which are definitely worth a look:
java sdk and java3d sdk, available from blackdown.orginkscape, an excellent vector graphics program from inkscape.org,
saves as open svg format and exports to a variety of bitmap formatsfilelight, a great visualisation tool for showing drive usage - either available on its own from
kde-apps.org or as part of the also impressive krusader
file-management toolgarble, a small app for downloading tracks and waypoints from Garmin GPS units. Comes with Knoppix as
part of the GpsDrive app, but rather buggy as it stands - see the downloads section
for an updated version with long waypoint name support, altitude support and working screenshot grabs.dictd provides a local dictionary server to interrogate dictionaries found at
freedict.de - you only need these if you want to use your kdict client
without connecting to an online server. Dictfmt lets you create your own dictionaries.
Ding is a separate translation app, focusing on
German<->English translationskstars is a superb star-gazing app, which comes included with Knoppix but turned into a bit of a pain to install
on Mandriva. I wasn't able to compile from the source, so looked for the rpm, but it only seems to be available in
a combined 'kdeedu' package with random, unrelated apps that I didn't want. And these have dependencies for text-to-speech
libraries which require voice libraries and so on and so on, in total over 27 MB of files. But it now works.hugin for photo-stitching, see above.skype for free telephoning and chatting, see the internet section for more info.krename is a powerful tool for bulk renaming of files, very useful for sorting out photos in consecutive
order, for example.lame encodes sound files into mp3 format. Unlike ogg, this encoding mechanism suffers from patent restrictions,
so must be obtained from the plf libraries rather than the "official" Mandriva ones. See tips for
help with ripping audio CDs.gnuplot is an impressive graph-plotting application. Impressive because not only can it do many many things with
different kinds of graphs, but because it can generate a simple, no-nonsense plot within minutes of installing. It can even load
GPS files and plot a (rough) picture!Google Earth is the renowned mapping program from Google, but not to be confused with the browser-based
"Google Maps". This one is a download-and-install application, with an amazing slick interface, and a remarkable 3d presentation of
mountains and valleys, volcanoes and lakes, allowing spectacular fly-overs and explorations. Very very cool. The download is a 16 MB
.bin file, which installs smoothly even without root privileges into the user directory. You have to be online to
stream the data, but then you can run it offline to see the same places again. The program is still beta but at least here it's
fairly stable and fairly (not completely) bug-free.Other interesting programs / fixes
kile is a GUI for writing tex documents, allowing you to create pdf or postscript files from a powerful
markup language. It's a slightly easier interface than using the command line tools tex and dvipdf.tuxracer was an eagerly-awaited penguin-sliding-on-stomach-down-snowy-hill racing game, and although it
installed fine, my X config was wrong giving rather poor graphics performance, so it just ended up chuggy and not
really playable. Thanks to Xubuntu I realised that this wasn't just poor hardware, just config, and have now got Tuxracer
running smooooothly.euphoria to run properly) I tried installing the Intel
display drivers downloaded from their website. Alas, it borked on the compile and I wasn't able to fix it. The problem was either
something to do with APGPART, or a mismatch between my kernel and my kernel source. But in any case it wasn't necessary (as mentioned
above) and I now have smooth graphics even without the Intel drivers.The following installs were less impressive, or not (yet) so successful:
enlightenment sounds like a cutting-edge and eye-candy-rich windowing system to run instead of kde,
but on this system it did not want to play at all. (See Elive for a live
version of this system).beebem is an emulator for the BBC B (my old computer!) but the compile failed with Gtk errors, so I'm stuck.