How Do I Do That?

There are lots of tasks that may seem relatively simple in Windows, but may be a bit more difficult to do in Linux. This page presents a variety of these tasks, and the best ways to solve them using tools in Linux. Wherever possible, we'll try to notate when a solution is presented using Free software, and when a solution requires the use of proprietary software in Linux.

If you have other ideas, feel free to add them to this table, if you're not comfortable editing the HTML in this table, then add them to the list at the end of this page. If you can answer an issue, add it to this table and make a note that you can do it.

How do I do that?

Multimedia
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Burn a CD/DVD	Roxio Toast Nero	Nautilus, the file manager for GNOME has integrated burning of ISO backup images images. k3b is a robust CD/DVD burner for the KDE desktop.
Rip a CD	iTunes MediaMonkey Nero	Sound Juicer is part of the GNOME desktop and automatically fetches the metadata for the songs including artist and track name. It can rip tracks to mp3, ogg, flac, and almost any other format you desire.
Rip a DVD	Ripping video DVDs implies breaking of the CSS copy protection/encryption present on the disc. Although this system is very weak, it is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to do so. As such, while it's easy to take a DVD and use a decrypter to copy the DVD, and even then later take the DVD image and shrink it to fit on a cheap 4.7GB disk, we can't tell you how to do it. But, we're sure Google could.
Record live television	SageTV BeyondTV Windows Media Center Edition	MythTV - Supports a wide variety of both standard definition and high definition tuner cards, including firewire cable boxes and the HD Homerun Ethernet attached HDTV tuner. Allows for pausing of live television, themable user interfaces, automatic commercial cutting, and more. Patrick Wagstrom Freevo - while Freevo is much easier to setup than MythTV, it is not nearly as robust of a solution. It does not allow viewing of television until after the complete recording is done, and is lacking support for a wide variety of hardware.
Transfer photos off a camera	Whatever software came with your camera	The GNOME desktop should automatically detect when you've plugged your camera in and ask if you'd like to download the photos. A word of warning for compulsive organizers, the import functionality provided directly by the desktop automatically rotates your images, creating a discontinuity between the image and its exif tags. F-Spot has facilities to automatically import from a camera. Patrick Wagstrom
Organize photos	Picasa Adobe Album	F-Spot works much like Adobe Album and the interface will be pretty simple to navigate for those experienced with Adobe Album. It also has the ability to tag the images for easier categorization of the images. Patrick Wagstrom Picasa is also available for Linux. It's a fine example of utilizing Wine to easily port an existing Windows application. Its very nice for automatically touching up photos. not open source
Publish photos to a website	Picasa	F-Spot can publish photos to a wide variety of websites including flickr and Picasa albums. It also can create static HTML output, and if you're really adventurous, your own mini version of Flickr using PennAve. Picasa can publish photos from Linux and windows. not open source
Play a movie	Windows Media Player	Totem Mplayer
Organize and manage MP3s	iTunes MediaMonkey	RhythmBox Banshee is a C# application for GNOME that manages your music and more thanks to its intelligent plugin structure. Patrick Wagstrom
Sync to an iPod	iTunes	Banshee supports syncing your music library to iPods, Creative Nomads, and a variety of other devices. It also is able to do on the fly transcoding of those files. Patrick Wagstrom GTKPod
Edit Video	Adobe Premiere Microsoft Movie Maker	LIVES is a robust and actively developed video editing solution. Cineralla is the 50 ton behemoth of video editing in Linux. Don't expect an easy to use solution here, but if you're looking for something that can max 6 channel 24 bit audio and full 1920x1080p video into the hottest H.264 output, this is the tool to use. If all that makes no sense, then Cinerella is probably not the tool for you.
Edit a photograph	Adobe Photoshop	The Gimp is the canonical graphics manipulation program for Linux systems. It is shipped with most versions of Linux and provides enough features to keep an amature photographer happy for quite some time. However, the Gimp is starting to show its age and is lacking features that advanced users may find helpful, such as color masks and 32 bit image depth. also availalble for Windows Patrick Wagstrom Krita is a graphics editor for KDE systems that has seen rapid development in the past few years and is shaping up to be a true contender in the field of graphics.
Create a vector graphic	Adobe Illustrator	Inkscape is a powerful cross platform vector graphics editor that natively handles SVG images. also available for windows Patrick Wagstrom Karbon14 is a vector graphics editor for KDE
Office Tasks
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Write a letter	Microsoft Word
Design a presentation	Microsoft Powerpoint
Create a small database	Microsoft Access
Design a spreadsheet	Microsoft Excel
Collaborate using groupware	Microsoft Outlook
Balance a checkbook	Quicken Microsoft Money	GNUCash has matured into a very mature piece of financial software. It has some support for OFX transactions to download account information directly from your bank or credit card. The program has come a long way in the past few years, so if you remember it from the days when everything was in Scheme, you may want to check out the newest version. JGnash is the program that WPLUG uses to manage their accounts. It's significantly simpler to run that GNUCash, but as a result, it lacks much of the flexibility inherent in GNUCash. This program is written in Java so it will run on most platforms. also available for Windows Moneydance is a very flexible and powerful personal finance package written in Java. It has built in support for many banks and online account services, such as IRAs, credit cards, etc. The visualization tools have come a long way and the budgeting tools help you make sure you're not spending too much money. Moneydance is commercial software and costs $29.99. not open source also available for Windows Patrick Wagstrom
Manage business finances	Quickbooks
Fill out tax forms	TurboTax, TaxCut	Sidney from Solutions for Progress is a web based system for doing your taxes. At the current rate it has limited support for state taxes (Pennsylvania is included), has an income cap of $52,000, and is limited to the first 75,000 users. This program is written by one of the contributors to the Metacity window manager for GNOME.
Create a PDF file	Adobe Acrobat	Most Linux programs can print to PostScript, check the "Print to File" option if it's not available. Then use the ps2pdf program to translate. OpenOffice.org has a feature to save directly to a PDF file
View a PDF file	Adobe Reader Adobe Acrobat	Evince is part of GNOME and supports most PDF functions. KPDF is a very robust PDF viewer for KDE Adobe reader for Linux operates very similarly to the windows version. not open source
Internet Communications
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Browse the web	Internet Explorer	Mozilla Firefox Opera - this lightweight and fully standards compliant browser is available for a huge variety of operating systems. not open source Epiphany - the fully GNOME integrated web browser
Send an email	Microsoft Outlook	Mozilla Thunderbird Evolution Mutt - console mode email client that goes by the slogan "all mail clients suck, this one just sucks less"
Send instant messages	Microsoft Live Messenger AOL Instant Messenger Yahoo Instant Messenger Google Talk	GAIM - a multi-protocol, multi-platform instant messenger client that can connect to almost any instant messenger client. also available for Windows Gossip - a jabber focused instant messenger client, that now supports a huge variety of networks thanks to integration with Telepathy - Patrick Wagstrom
Participate in Internet Relay Chat (IRC)	mIRC	X-Chat Irssi
Server Tasks
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Run a large scale database	Microsoft SQL Server	PostgreSQL - known as the workhorse of the OpenSource Database field. PostgreSQL supports a variety of languages for stored procedures, foreign keys, has interfaces to many programming languages, and runs on a variety of systems.User:Pwagstro MySQL - is a very fast SQL server that is easy to setup and scales fairly well. Despite it's earlier faults, MySQL is now a fully functional relational database program.User:Pwagstro
Provide email services	Microsoft Exchange	Postfix Sendmail Hula
Serve web pages	Microsoft IIS	Apache
Customer Relationship Management	Microsoft CRM	SugarCRM - markets itself as "Commercial Open Source". A very high quality package of CRM tools to manage all aspects of business relations.
System Maintenance
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Scan for viruses	Symantec AntiVirus
Scan for malware/spyware
Scan for rootkits
Backup my hard disk		Bacula is a very robust network based backup system.
System Administration
Issue	In Windows I'd Use...	In Linux I'd Use...
Install Software
Remove Software
Add a new user
Switch users without logging out

I'd like to see how to do that!

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