use Perl

So this is my first foray into the Linux world. I've been installing a huge amount of software.

• Synaptic is great, but doesn't include enough.
• Downloading RPMs is OK, but too often leads to dependancy hell (particularly since FC2 is so new).
• Sun's installer (for JRE, JDK, JAI, ...) is just odd.
• Firefox does not seem to have an RPM, but the shell script worked well.
• jEdit had a nifty installer, but I'm not able to set it as my default text editor for some reason.
• I like Evolution (though Thunderbird may continue to be my primary emailer, since it has better junk email filtering).
• I put Ant and XXE, in /usr/share then modified my /etc/profile for Ant path and home info (as I did for Java).
• gFTP seems to hang too easily when downloading from an IIS FTP server.
• I'd be more excited about WineX if the first two games I looked for had been supported (Simpsons H&R and Neverwinter).

What has really irritated me is the inability to add items to the applications menu. Apparently, rather than right-clicking the menu, you must right-click an item in the menu, then use the "entire menu" submenu. In FC1, which I had installed for a couple of days (no built-in ALSA support for my digital speakers), the "Add new item to this menu" option always failed with "Unsupported operation". In the new version, the menu item is completely greyed out (even when I am logged in as root).