Linux Dummies 9th

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Part III: Getting Things Done
Watchin’ DVDs
Watching a DVD in Linux is a bit of a legal quagmire if you live in the United
States. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other issues make
it tricky for any open-source program to navigate the licensing maze when it
comes to movies that are encoded or protected in various fashions. However,
not all DVDs have such countermeasures enabled: There are DVDs that
Americans can watch under Linux with no trouble. (Note that we say watch,
and not copy or pirate.)
For more on the DMCA and the problems that stem from it, go to antidmca.org.
To watch a DVD in Fedora, you can use Totem. However, as you saw when
trying to view video files, the version of Totem that comes with Fedora is
stripped down in terms of formats that it can support — again, this is a legal
issue more than anything else. Often it’s possible to replace this version with
the full one by uninstalling Totem, adding software repositories that contain
multimedia tools, and then installing the full version of Totem from those
repositories (all these skills are discussed in Chapter 16). This is the solution
we recommend for watching DVDs.
The Unofficial Fedora FAQ Web site (www.fedorafaq.org) provides some
more tips on ways to view DVDs on your Fedora computer.
Creating and Modifying Graphics
The GIMP is a graphics program that’s considered in many ways equivalent
to Adobe Photoshop. Many don’t consider The GIMP the friendliest program
on the planet, but at the very least, it has enough features to keep you
busily experimenting for weeks! To open The GIMP, choose Applications➪
Graphics➪GIMP Image Editor (in Fedora, it’s listed by its full name — GNU
Image Manipulation Program).
When you start The GIMP, you have to walk through its user-setup routine.
Fortunately, you can just click Continue each time you’re prompted, unless
you’re a graphics guru who has a particular reason for wanting to do things
in a different way. After you’ve clicked past all these dialog boxes, a collection
of one or more dialog boxes pops up, containing The GIMP main dialog
box (see Figure 14-5) plus two additional tool dialog boxes. You can close
the right-side dialog box that contains the Layers, Channels, Paths, and Undo