Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Finding More Software

What if you can’t find what you’re looking for through the official (and not so official) sources discussed in the previous section? Those aren’t your only options. Although I can’t anticipate every situation you might find yourself in, I can at least give you some tips for how to find extra software and how to install much of it.

Here are the general steps for finding new software:

1.	Check the Fedora FAQ (www.fedorafaq.org), Fedora News (www.fedoranews.org), the Fedora Forum (www.fedoraforum.org), and other online sites that people might recommend.
2.	If you don’t know what you want, find out by opening your favorite Web search engine and searching on a feature and the word linux. For example, maybe you want something comparable to the program irfanview from the Windows world, so you would search on irfanview linux.
3.	Sort through the search results and see whether a particular program is suggested. If not, add the word equivalent to your search and search again. So, to continue the example, you would search again but this time use irfanview linux equivalent. Now you start to see a program called xnview mentioned. It wouldn’t hurt to turn around and look and see whether Fedora’s Package Manager offers this program, before you bother installing it by hand.
4.	After you find a program you want, do a Web search for it. More often than not, you find the program’s home page.
5.	Click through to that program’s home page.
6.	Click through the Download link on ...