Designed as an all-around Linux distribution, Puppy Linux [1] comes with applications that cover pretty much every aspect of productive computing. Even if you decide not to switch to Puppy Linux entirely, this tiny distro still provides an excellent showcase of lightweight applications you might want to use with your favorite Linux distribution. Because it would be impossible to cover all the tools and applications that come with Puppy Linux, in this article, I'll focus only on a few interesting lightweight applications that deserve a place in your productivity arsenal.

Fotoxx

The tour starts with Fotoxx – a surprisingly capable photo manager with a user-friendly interface and a slew of nifty features (Figure 1). For starters, you can use Fotoxx as a simple photo viewer. When you open a photo with the Open button, Fotoxx automatically sets the folder in which the photo is stored as the working directory, and the Previous and Next buttons let you browse other photos in it. In addition, you can use the Index button to view your photo collection as thumbnails. The Edit Image menu provides access to all of Fotoxx's image editing features: the Tune tool for adjusting brightness, contrast, and color; Crop for cropping photos; Red Eye for removing the red eye effect from portraits; Sharpen and Reduce noise for improving image quality; and Rotate for rotating photos. Also, the handy Unbend tool can be useful for adjusting perspective – a problem that often occurs on pictures of tall buildings.

Besides these useful and uncomplicated tools, Fotoxx offers two rather nifty features: HDR and Panorama. The HDR tool allows you to combine two photos with different exposures (usually an underexposed and an overexposed photo) into a single image to achieve a wider range of tonal detail. Creating an HDR image in Fotoxx is easy: Just select the directory containing the source photos, and the application does the rest. Then you can tweak the final result by adjusting the brightness settings.

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