lfng_book.book Page 31 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM 3 A NEW PLACE TO CALL HOME Getting to Know the Desktop So now you have Fedora installed on your machine and are ready and raring to go. The login screen that will appear every time you boot up Fedora Core is there waiting for you (see Figure 3-1 on the next page). There’s no need to keep the login screen waiting, so just type your username and press ENTER. After that, you will be prompted for your user password in the same screen. Type it in and press ENTER again. Now, within moments, you will have your first glimpse of your new desktop within Fedora. lfng_book.book Page 32 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM Figure 3-1: The Fedora Core login screen Welcome to the GNOME Desktop As I mentioned earlier, your Fedora distribution comes with two graphical desktop environments: GNOME and KDE. Both have their own strengths and weaknesses, and, as such, both have their fans and detractors. However, as GNOME is the default environment in Fedora Core, and because I think it is much easier for new Linux users to deal with, we will focus on it almost exclusively in this book. In case you’re wondering whether or not you’re missing out on anything by using GNOME, let me assure you that you are not. You can run any KDE application from within GNOME, and vice versa. In fact, once you have a look at the Main menu, you will see that there are many KDE applications (apps, for short) listed in the various submenus. Most apps beginning with a K are KDE apps, such as the KAtomic and KBounce games, and the KPPP Internet dialer, which I will discuss in Chapter 4. If you followed my directions in Chapter 2, KDE is also installed on your machine, and you are free to use it on your own once you’re finished with this book. The GNOME desktop is shown in Figure 3-2, and as you can see, it isn’t all that different from what you might be used to in a Windows environment. But don’t be completely fooled; despite the similarities, things are different enough to be interesting. There are three main elements that you will probably notice right off the bat: the desktop icons, the GNOME Panel at the bottom of the screen, and the Main menu button at the far left corner of the GNOME Panel. I will focus on these elements in this chapter. 32 Chapter 3 lfng_book.book Page 33 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM Figure 3-2: The GNOME desktop Desktop Icons As you can see, there are three icons on the desktop: user’s Home, Start Here, and Trash. To makes things simple, we’ll start with the easiest and, no doubt, most familiar of these: Trash. Trash There is nothing mysterious about Trash . at least nothing mysterious about the desktop Trash icon. It functions just as it does in other operating systems. Drag a file you no longer need or want to the Trash icon, and the can will fill up. If you want to empty the Trash, just right-click the Trash icon and, from the pop- up menu, select Empty Trash. If you drag something into the Trash that you are not supposed to, you will be informed that you can’t do that. All very simple and familiar, no matter from whence you came. Start Here Despite the name of this icon, you needn’t start with it. In fact, you can completely ignore it, as it is merely a collection of system preference links that can be more easily selected from the Main menu, but more on that later. A New Place to Call Home 33 lfng_book.book Page 34 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM user’s Home The user’s Home icon on your own desktop will not say “user’s.” It will instead be labeled with whatever your username happens to be. For example, my username is “rg,” so my desktop icon says “rg’s Home.” If you are logged in as malachi, it will say “malachi’s Home,” and so on. All quite logical. Of course, I can’t possibly guess the username of every person reading this book, so I will stick to the more generic “user’s Home,” or just “Home,” when referring to this icon, and, as you will soon find out, I will do so very often. As you will notice, the Home icon is the image of a house (home) on a folder. This should tell you that it is your home folder — something like the My Documents folder in a Windows system. This is where all your files will be saved to, all your downloads will be downloaded to, and all your music will be ripped to. It is your territory and, even if you are on a multi-user machine, nobody except you (assuming you are the only one who knows the root password) will be able to nose around in there. Nautilus If you double-click your user’s Home icon, a window will open up showing you the contents of the folder — it serves as a shortcut to your user’s folder on the hard disk. The program that creates this file-viewing and file-organizing system is called Nautilus. You may not have thought of an operating system’s file manager as a program before, but, in fact, that is what it is. Nautilus has a lot of interesting features that deserve mention. For example, Nautilus has a very cool feature that no doubt was inspired by Mac OS 9’s WindowShade feature: Double-clicking the title bar of any Nautilus window causes the window to roll up, so to speak, into the title bar — a useful feature when trying to get one window out of the way for a moment or two. There are many more such features, so I will point out a few now, and more will appear in later chapters. Nautilus as an Image Viewer One of the very handy things about Nautilus is that it acts as a sort of picture viewer and previewer. When you view the contents of a folder that contains graphics files, Nautilus displays thumbnails of the files (as shown in Figure 3-3) along with the filenames. This lets you see your graphics files without having to use any other special imaging software. Admittedly, this feature is no longer unique in the world of operating systems, but it is handy nonetheless. 34 Chapter 3 lfng_book.book Page 35 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM Figure 3-3: Viewing thumbnails in a Nautilus window What is unique in Nautilus, however, is that when you double-click one of your thumbnails, the image will open in the same window at a larger size, as shown in Figure 3-4. In addition to that, you can zoom in to and out of the enlarged image by manipulating the + and – magnifying glass buttons or by right-clicking that general button area and selecting the desired percentage of zoom directly from the pop-up menu. Figure 3-4: Viewing an enlarged image in a Nautilus window A New Place to Call Home 35 lfng_book.book Page 36 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM You cannot manipulate the image in any way while viewing it in Nautilus, but if you want to make any changes to the image, all you have to do is right-click it and then select Open With > The Gimp in the pop-up menu, which opens the file in the GIMP — the Linux world’s answer to Photoshop (more about using the GIMP later in this chapter and in Chapter 14). With the GIMP, you can, among other things, change the size of the image, adjust the color balance, brightness, and contrast, convert the image from one format to another (from .jpg to .png, for example), airbrush in a beauty mark on your cheek, and even stamp little green peppers all over your head. All very cool indeed. Using Nautilus to View Text and PDF Files In addition to letting you view graphics files, Nautilus also allows you to read the contents of text files (those saved with a .txt file format), again without the need for any other software. If, for example, you have some notes that you jotted down and saved as a text file, you can simply double-click the file’s icon in Nautilus, and its contents will be displayed in the Nautilus window. Nautilus can even do the same for PDF files, acting as a simple PDF previewer. The Nautilus Side Pane Nautilus also has a side-pane feature that opens up a variety of options. To see the side pane, go to the View menu at the top of a Nautilus window and select Side Pane. Your Nautilus window will now show a mostly empty pane on its left side, with your username emblazoned upon it. In addition to your username, the side pane also shows how many files and subfolders you have in the folder you are currently viewing, and when you last added or deleted any files or subfolders in that folder. If that isn’t enough to get your blood flowing, there’s more. Figure 3-5: Using the Tree view in the Nautilus side pane 36 Chapter 3 lfng_book.book Page 37 Tuesday, February 10, 2004 10:22 AM If you click the Information menu within the side pane, you can see other options.