Everyone needs a good calendar application but they are often large, cumbersome, and not user-friendly. Orage is different. I have never used it before but within about one minute of opening the application, I had already setup an appointment for Monday. Open Orage by navigating to the Office application group then Calendar. The small calendar application opens on your desktop with today's date in highlight. To setup a new event, double-click the date for which you want to set the event. A small date window opens (See Figure 5). Select File, New or click the New icon and the New Event Details form appears. Enter your event details, set recurrence, alarms, and notes, and then Save. Once saved, the Title of the event is saved to the New Event window and the date is now in bold. To receive your event notices, you don't have to have Orage open--a very powerful feature indeed since I never remember to open my calendar application to receive my notices.

The Terminal application is a command line interface for your system. Terminal is a lightweight terminal emulator that is packed with customizable features and options. You can choose to view multiple Toolbars and set a myriad of preferences such as window title, color, background, and keyboard behaviors. Terminal is an essential part of any system administrator's arsenal of preferred applications. It is so essential that the developers have placed it in the main Panel. See Figure 7 for a look at my customized Terminal.

You may wonder why I added the Xarchiver tool to the essential apps list above but you'll soon find that it is a regular player on your team. The Xarchiver can be called directly from the Accessories group, from the command line, or within Thunar. My preference is to use it within Thunar. To create an archive, select a group of files in Thunar, right click that group, and then choose Create Archive from the menu. You are presented with the Xarchiver interface where you name your archive, select its location, and the type of archive from the list (arj, tar, tar.bz2, tar.gz, jar, zip). Choosing arj, tar.gz, tar.bz2, or zip provides some compression with your archive so that the archive is smaller than the original group of files (see Figure 8).

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