Pencil is an advanced drawing and animation tool that creates traditional, hand-drawn 2D animations and static sketches. Think of this animation/drawing application as an Etch A Sketch with colored sand on steroids. Pencil creates both bitmap and vector images. Finished animations can be exported as a PNG image. Animated sketches can be exported in several handy Flash or Movie file formats.

If you are looking for a fast, reliable, trouble-free, lightweight PDF viewer, and you stumble upon xPDF in your distro’s app listings — keep stumbling. Chances are it will not run on your Linux configuration. In theory, xPDF is a promising alternative to PDF viewers available for the Linux desktop such as Adobe PDF Viewer, Okular and Evince. It is a fast and light application that does not exhibit sluggish performance.

Knoppix is a lightweight Linux distro that is anything but light in its features and functions. It equals or exceeds the performance of all the desktop varieties I run in Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It also could easily replace the portability on a stick I get with Puppy Linux. Knoppix, much like Puppy Linux, provides a fully functional Linux distro that boots from a DVD or USB drive.

PeaZip is a handy utility for reducing the size of large files and archiving different files into one big container. Unlike most file compression tools for Linux, PeaZip’s user interface makes it easy to manage. When it comes to zipping and unzipping files, simplicity counts for most everything. PeaZip is a cross platform file and archive manager available for Linux, BSD and Windows platforms.

Chakra is an unusual Linux distro that rethinks what the Linux desktop should be. It gives users the tools to do it their way. This interesting approach to learning what makes Linux tick, however, is not a good starting point for first-time Linux users. I was intrigued with Chakra’s ground-up reconstruction and the notion that developers need to keep it simple, stupid (also known as the KISS Principle.)