My Kubuntu 8.04 Desktop - Screnshot No 1Screen 01Choose image size 960x600 or 1440x900 (will open in a new separate window) ~~~~~~~~~~ O ~~~~~~~~~~ DesktopThis was a view of my desktop when I was re-designing the Music Section of this web site (July 2010) - it wasn't 'contrived', that is exactly how it looked when I was upgrading this web site. For those of you who have never used a linux system this will be an interesting eye-opener. Shading is when only the title bar of the program window is in view. All the brown bars on the left hand side of the screen are windows which have been shaded. All I have to do to shade and unshade is to place the mouse pointer on the title bar and scroll the middle button, up to shade and down to unshade - as I did on the window with the title track-times.txt. I think you will agree that shading windows allows the user to quickly 'mimimize' a window which they don't immediately need. I use that feature all the time. The Console (the window on the bottom left of the screen) allows the user to key in commands. This is similar to DOS which was the computer operating system by Microsoft before Windows 3.1. But unlike Microsoft's DOS, linux has a choice of command line interpreters (which are programs to carry out the commands types in). The commandline interpreter I use is bash and is a thousand times more powerful than DOS ever was - most of the scripts on this site are bash scripts. Console is called a command-line interface or CLI for short. The opposite of CLI is, of course, GUI - graphical user interface - like Microsoft Windows, Apple's operating systems and my main desktop programs (KDE), where you use the mouse to click icons to get programs running.
As you can see from the last entry in the command line, it is: This command took a screenshot of the present desktop and saved it to a file named screen-4 in my home directory. This command created the above image. This may look as if this is old-fashioned and backwards but you cannot imagine how useful and powerful it is. The console can be used to automate so many daily tasks. I would be thoroughly lost without it. Amarok, the window on the bottom right, is a music player. It plays MP3s, CDs, and also the internet radio. I use it for my music collection of MP3 files. I use KAudioCreator to rip the files from my CDs. That program uses another program Lame to encode those ripped files as MP3s. Linux is a wonderful system in that you can 'chain' programs together to build up a really powerful system and suite of programs. (This is especially handy within the bash scripting environment - you use the output of one program as the input of another etc.) Amarok can create it's own set of playlists but I prefer to create my own and organise them myself. At the top right of the screen there is a file manager - Konqueror, but it's not like a Microsoft file manager, this is much much better - this is a file manager on steroids! There are tabs, so you can have different directories (folders) open at the same time. I have 3 open here - www.lou-gogan.com, music-old, and songs. Then as you can see from the image, you can open a directory (folder) WITHIN that window as I have done with the directory cd-01. Konqueror does so much that I would need about 10 screens to show them all. In any tab it can display an image, or a text file, a web page, play a video, play a song, view a pdf file. It really is the best file manager one could ever imagine. Most of the shaded windows were opened with the Mousepad program - a simple text file viewer and editor. I would be totally lost without it. It is a favourite program. Top left, and shaded, is Firefox - a great internet browser. ~~~~~~~~~~ O ~~~~~~~~~~ TaskbarThe taskbar (the bar at the bottom of the desktop) is very interesting and you will find some strange features to it. From the right hand side:
The Clock. Then there are the icons for programs which run all the time: This is something you have never seen using a Microsoft operating system. In Linux it is possible to have more than one desktop. Here I have 4 set up - the 4 main squares. Within the 4 main squares you can see the small windows. You can have any programs on any desktop - sometimes you can have the same program window open on all the desktops, or the same program opened a few times on each of the desktops - basically ther are no rules! It is possible to send any window from one desktop to any other by either dragging within the small desktop icons in the taskbar, or by a menu accessed by right clicking on any titlebar of any window. Desktop 4 (internet): this is highlighted (whiter) because it is the desktop 'in view' - the image above. I use this for surfing the web and also for writing my html and php scripts and then checking out the results on my browser using the apache web server to make sure all the pages are as perfect and as error free as is possible. The konqueror file manager is always open and running (with 2 or 3 tabs open), along with the kconsole (3 tabs) for the .htaccess file editing and for uploading files to the internet. And, of course Firefox for the browser. Desktop 3 (email): I usually keep this for emails and correspondence relating to emails. I use kmail for the email program. I also have kconsole running (2 tabs) for running whois and hosts etc, and when reporting spam (via spamcop) I have another instance of konqueror (browser and file explorer) running.
Desktop 2 (files): is for the main instance of konqueror (file viewer and browser) for managing files. I also use this desktop for checking the apache log files and log scripts associated with the web site. It also has kconsole running (3 tabs), for whois and a script which sends email abuse reports. When checking the log for the previous day I also usually have 7 leafpad (simple text file viewer) windows open. Desktop 1 (home): I usually keep this desktop for my main kconsole (3 tabs) - for my diary, and other text files use via the kconsole. I also have the Akregator (an rss feed viewer) open when reading feeds. I usually play computer games on this desktop and can switch to any other desktop to do work and return to this desktop to resume the important uses of a computer - to play games! (NOT really!). It is possible to have as many desktops as you want or need. it only depends on your ram (computer memory), chip speed etc. Having 4 desktops suits me fine. I'm not greedy! The very handy thing about those 4 little squares (repsrsentation of the 4 desktops) is that you can grab any window and drag it onto any other desktop using those small squares - really handy! Or you can have a window showing up in all desktops. Isn't linux fabulous! Updated: 30th October 2012 |
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