Thanks go to Pragmatic Programmers for not slamming the door in the face of a crazy guy who suggested a one-chapter book full of things he thinks are cool. Thanks go to Jackie Carter, my editor, plus Pragmatic Programmer overlords Andy and Dave for their patience, guidance and encouragement. I’ve never met such switched-on, optimistic and gen-uinely agile people in over a decade of working in publishing. To para-phrase Simon & Garfunkel, they’ve got a groovy thing going on.
Thanks also to the small army of technical reviewers who put this book through its paces prior to release and often suggested impor-tant improvements. My gratitude goes to John Dong, Matthew Helmke, Eric Hewitt, Carthik Sharma, John Southern, and Aaron Porter. There’s some astonishingly large brains in that list. A zombie would have a
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 18
feast. I’m honored that they all agreed to give this book the benefit of their experience and knowledge.
Finally, thanks to the beta testers who took a chance on this book before it was officially published. Your errata comments madeUbuntu Kung Fua stronger book.
—Keir Thomas, September 2008
Chapter 2
An Ubuntu administration crash course
There’s a time when all of us sit down in front of Ubuntu for the first time. The African drum beats of the login sound fade away and we’re greeted by the orange and browns of the desktop wallpaper. (Orange and brown? Whatwerethey thinking?)
What goes through your mind following this probably depends on how busy you are. To quote from Peter Pan, Ubuntu can be an “awfully big adventure.” But for that to be true you have to be the kind of person who enjoys adventures. I suspect most people simply want to know what’s what, and how things work.
That’s what this chapter is about. It’s a crash course in basic Ubuntu skills and knowledge. It’s the mechanic’s guide that tells you which end of a screwdriver is the useful one, and how to use it. It’s necessary because you’ll have to get your hands dirty under the hood of Ubuntu, not only to follow the tips in this book, but as part of day-to-day life with the operating system.
There are certainly more comprehensive introductory guides to Ubuntu (I recommendBeginning Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition, written by myself and Jaime Sicam). However, if you have little time to spare, or just a brief attention span, this chapter will give you enough know-how to get by. You might have to read it more than once, and maybe come back to it later. That’s fine. It isn’t going anywhere.
Even if you’re an experienced Ubuntu user it might be worth skimming through this chapter to ensure you know enough to proceed to the
THEUBUNTU DESKTOP 20
tips ahead. I’d ask that you pay particular attention to the section that describes how to use gconf-editor, which is used extensively in some of the tips. This is a lesser-known but very useful configuration tool.
So let’s get to it.
2.1 The Ubuntu desktop
Before we get down to specifics, let’s take an overview of the Ubuntu desktop. If you’ve already spent time playing around with the desktop then you can probably skip this part.
You first thing you might notice is that it’s virtually icon-free. This is just because the Ubuntu developers don’t like clutter. You can drag and drop icons onto the desktop and get it as messy as you wish.
At the top and bottom of the screen are the panels. These are almost identical to Windows’ taskbar, except that there are two of them. The one at the top tends to be about running software and presenting infor-mation to the user. The one at the bottom is where programs minimize to, and contains a Show Desktop button (left) and Trash icon (right), along with a virtual desktop switcher (far right).
On the top panel there are three menus—Applications, Places, and Sys-tem. These will always stick around, no matter what. An application’s own menus (File, Edit, View etc.) will appear underneath.
The Applications menu contains the software you use on a day-to-day basis—media players, office applications, calculator, and so on.
However, software used to administrate the software isn’t found there.
That’s on the System menu, which has two sub-menus—Preferences, and Administration. Preferences lists programs that tweak settings spe-cific to your user account, such as changing the desktop wallpaper.
Administration lists programs that configure the overall system.
Programs on the System→Administration menu won’t run unless you type your login password when prompted. I explain more about this on page22.
The Places menu provides quick access to the file system, or to any other file system that is attached to your computer, such as your Win-dows partition, or USB memory sticks that are plugged in. See Fig-ure2.1, on the following page for an example. The Windows partition will probably be identified as x GB Media, where x is the size of the
THEUBUNTU DESKTOP 21
Figure 2.1: Ubuntu’s Places menu
partition. USB memory sticks will be identified by their name (a.k.a.
their label). Incidentally, the file browser used in Ubuntu has a name—
Nautilus. It’s a cool piece of software in its own right so be sure to explore its functions. Like most applications in Ubuntu, it can be con-figured by clicking Edit→Preferences on its menu.
Your personal area on the disk is a folder named after your user name and can be found the /home folder. Often people simply refer to this as their “home folder”. It’s analogous toMy Documentsunder Windows.
There are several other subdirectories in your personal/homefolder for you to store stuff in—Documents,Music,Pictures, andVideos. There’s also the Desktop folder that, like Windows, simply contains any files stored on the desktop.
As mentioned earlier, the Trash icon lives at the bottom right of the desktop. Drag and drop stuff onto it to delete (or just right-click what you want to delete and selectMove to the Deleted Items folder). Click the Trash icon to see its contents and to see a button that lets you empty it.
USERS,PASSWORDS AND FILES 22
At the top right of the screen is the notification area, which is just like Windows’ System Tray area. Sometimes icons pop-up here to notify you of stuff, such as the fact that there are system updates available, or that you have new email. The volume control and clock live here, along with NetworkManager, which lets you configure your wifi/network connec-tion. There’s also something called the Fast User Switcher. That’s why your login name is listed there. Clicking it lets you switch between users on the system. It’s useless if there’s only one user setup on the system, which is probably the case for 99% of Ubuntu installations. You can get rid of it (or, indeed, anything on the panels) by right-clicking and selecting Remove from panel. You can add it back in again if you wish by right-clicking a blank spot on the panels and selectingAdd to panel. Then choose it from the list.
If you select Add to panel, you’ll also see lots of other handy applets (small programs with a specific function) that can be added to the panel.
Some are very useful, so take some time to explore.
Icons can be clicked and dragged from the menus to the desktop for ease of access. In addition, they can be dragged onto blank spots on the panels. The desktop can used as a semi-permanent store area for files, just like with Windows or Macintosh OS X. Just click and drag a file from the file browsing window. Files are always downloaded to the desktop by the web browser unless you specify otherwise.
Whereas Windows has Internet Explorer, Ubuntu uses Firefox (Applica-tions →Internet→ Firefox Web Browser). Outlook is replaced by Evo-lution (Applications→Internet→ Evolution Email). Microsoft Office is replaced by OpenOffice.org (Applications → Office). Pidgin is used for instant messaging (Applications→Internet→Pidgin Internet Messen-ger). GIMP is used for image editing (Applications→Graphics→GIMP Image Editor). Just have a click around on the menus—it’s fairly obvi-ous what everything does and it’s pretty hard to break anything.
Many tips in this book make reference to Gedit, which is a text editor.
This can be found on the Applications → Accessories menu, although you’ll nearly always start it from the command-line when following the tips.