Chapter 3. Gnome and KDE

GNOME and KDE are Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that are available for Linux. Most Linux variants bundle both of these GUIs so you have your choice of which to use. Both are based on the X Window System (X Windows) and provide a fully functional graphical user environment. Both GNOME and KDE are independent of the core Linux operating system, including the kernel. You can customize and even crash either of these GUIs and Linux keeps running.

This chapter does not spend a lot of time explaining these environments and showing a lot of screen shots for each. Everyone has used a graphical environment and the best way to customize one is by experimenting and finding what best suits your needs. Thus, this chapter provides an overview of each with most customization preferences left to the reader. This chapter also touches on the free office software package, OpenOffice.org, available from www.openoffice.org.

This chapter covers the following.

• Overview of GNOME and KDE

• Obtaining and installing OpenOffice.org