Scribus, a highly recommended free desktop publishing program

Websites, and wikipedia, give strongly favorable assessments of Scribus program as a free, open source program for desktop publishing. It is an alternative to the pricey industry standard, Adobe InDesign or the older Adobe Pagemaker. The program is cross-platform: it will run on Windows, Mac OS X, and most distributions of Linux. (There is a lighter weight version, Portable Scribus, for Windows, with a link at CNET.)

One authoritative Scribus site gives recommendations of a few pre-requisite programs. These programs should be installed before installing or operating Scribus.

System requirements:

What do you need for Scribus? To use Scribus you must have installed:
For Scribus Version 1.2 and higher:

GCC 3.x+. GCC 3.2+ is strongly recommended. Scribus 1.2 will not compile on GCC 2.95.x
QT Version 3.1 or higher, Version 3.1.2 or 3.3.x is strongly recommended
Ghostscript Version 7.07, Version 8+ is strongly recommended (itself a powerful and varied function program, also with a fre, GPL license)
Postscript (Type1) Fonts (recommended) or
True Type Fonts
libart_lgpl 2.3.8 or higher 2.3.16 recommended.
Python 2.1+ and development libraries
FreeType 2.1.0 or higher, FreeType 2.1.4+ is recommended
Optional Libs for the extended Features of Scribus:
The LittleCMS Library in Version 1.09+, 1.13 recommended
(Version 1.08 won't work),
if you want to use Color management.
Some ICC-Profiles, see the Readme for further Information.