Table of Contents for

Ubuntu: Up and Running

The first group of entries in this menu relate to your local computer, as follows:

The second group of entries relates to your computer’s hard disk drives and any attached USB memory sticks or external hard drives. In Figure 4-8, you can see the first item is called Computer. When you click it, a new window similar to the one shown in Figure 4-9 will appear showing all the storage devices and networks attached to your computer or connected to the network.

Figure 4-9. The File Browser open at the top level, showing attached storage devices

In both the Places menu and the File Browser, you may have noticed that this computer has a USB memory stick attached called READYBOOST, which is used to provide additional memory caching to Windows Vista. Because that computer has Ubuntu installed alongside Vista in a dual-boot system, I have left that device alone so that it’s ready for use whenever I need to reboot into Windows (not that I use it that often anymore).

Speaking of Windows, on that computer the HP drive is the name of the Windows partition. Such partitions can be accessed from Ubuntu. When you click one (either in the File Browser or the Places menu) you may be prompted for your password; if so, enter it. A window such as the one in Figure 4-10 will then open, and as long as the folders and files have the required permissions, you can copy files between the Ubuntu and Windows partitions.

Figure 4-10. Browsing the computer’s Windows partition

In Figure 4-8, you can see that I have mounted a network folder called transfer on iq500 in the Network group of the Places menu. This name means the folder called transfer on the computer called iq500. To access other computers and folders on the network, you click the Network entry to bring up a File Browser window such as the one in Figure 4-11, where two computers on the local network have been found (AMADEUS and MATTHEW), and a Windows network has also been detected.

Clicking AMADEUS takes me to the shared folders on another Linux computer on my desk, whereas clicking Windows Network first brings up the workgroups Ubuntu has detected within the Windows network. In my case, as shown in Figure 4-12, three workgroups have been found: HOME, MSHOME, and WORKGROUP.

Figure 4-11. Browsing the network

Figure 4-12. Three workgroups have been found on the Windows network

Clicking any of these will bring up another window showing all the computers within that network. So, for example, clicking MSHOME brings up five computers in the workgroup, as shown in Figure 4-13. From here on in, you can choose a computer and then select available folders on that machine, although you will have to enter the right passwords for computers that require them.

Figure 4-13. There are four computers in the MSHOME workgroup

Once you have connected to another computer and opened up a folder, it will then become accessible directly from the Places menu, and will also be mounted on the desktop as an icon.

Of course, if your computer isn’t part of a network or you have a different set of workgroups, what you see when you use the Networks group of the Places menu may be quite different. In any case, you should be able to access whatever Windows and Mac systems that your site can access.

The final group in the Places menu is for searching for files or selecting recently accessed documents. Figure 4-14 shows both the Search for Files window and the Recent Documents submenu of the Places menu.

Figure 4-14. Searching for Files and the Recent Documents menu

When searching for files you can tell Ubuntu where to look by clicking the “Look in folder” drop-down list and selecting the folders and/or computers or external drives to search.

If you wish to search for specific text within your files, click “Select more options” and you’ll be able to enter text to search for, and also narrow down results by date, file size, and several other specifiers.

As you will recall from Chapter 3, the System → Preferences menu (see Figure 4-16) is the place to go when you need to change various settings in your Ubuntu configuration, ranging from the keyboard and display to power management, sound, and the applications to run automatically when the computer boots up.

Figure 4-16. The System Preferences menu

There’s plenty of information on customizing your computer in the rest of this chapter and throughout this book, so I won’t go into further details in this section.

The System → Administration menu (see Figure 4-17) is where you make more fundamental changes to your computer, such as installing hardware device drivers, setting up TV tuners or webcams, and installing new packages.

Figure 4-17. The System Administration menu

All of these operations and more are fully explained throughout this chapter and the rest of this book.

The second group of menu items provides support through built-in web pages, specific information on Ubuntu, and GNOME’s online help.

If you are logged into the Pidgin or Empathy messaging programs, the first thing you can do is set your user presence by selecting the Set Status submenu. You can then choose to set your presence status to any of the following:

If you are not logged into either IM program, these options will be grayed out and unselectable.

This blanks out the screen, leaving only a password entry box, which is woken up only when a key is pressed or the mouse is moved (see Figure 4-21). To resume working on your computer, enter your password and click the Unlock button. Alternatively, you can use Switch User to log in as another user.

Figure 4-21. The Lock Screen command window

Other people can also leave you a message while you’re away with the Leave Message button. The Cancel button is there to darken the screen again without waiting for the blanking timeout delay. In Figure 4-21, you’ll see that the box reminds you which user you are on which computer. In this instance, I am user robin on the machine identified as robin-ubuntu-iq500.

This option lets you commence a guest session, which creates a new desktop with the user Guest logged in. Guest users have severely restricted permissions and are prevented from making any major changes. To exit from this session, click the icon again and select Log Out…. You will then be prompted for your password in order to resume using the account from which the Guest user desktop was called up.

This takes you back to the login screen shown earlier in Figure 4-1, where you can log in as another user or log back into your previous session.

This option logs you out of your current session and returns you to the login screen, where you can choose to log in again as another (or the same) user, reboot the computer, or turn it off. The difference between Switch User… and Log Out… is that the former keeps your programs open when returning to the Login screen, whereas the latter closes them all first.

With the Suspend option you can put the computer to sleep so that all processing is suspended until you reawaken it by pressing a key or by using the mouse. A word of caution here though, because Ubuntu has a known history of occasional problems with this feature, and sometimes, depending on your hardware, it may crash and won’t reawaken (or Resume) in a usable state. I recommend that you test it without any important programs open before deciding whether to use it in the future.

The Hibernate option goes a step further because it saves the current configuration to hard disk and then completely turns the computer off. This is the best method for saving electricity while being able to return to exactly where you left off the next time you turn the computer on. Again, testing is recommended before relying on this feature.

When you select this option, your computer starts a 60-second countdown timer in a window on the desktop, leading to the restarting of your computer. You can choose to click the Cancel button if you didn’t intend to restart your PC, or the Restart button to bypass the timer and restart immediately.

However, if other users are logged into the computer, another window will pop up requesting your password before allowing the restart to occur. You can either type in your password and click the Authenticate button to force a restart, or click the Cancel button to halt the process.

This option works identically to Restart, except that the computer is turned off and does not turn on again until you press its on button.

Starting with Ubuntu 10.04, the Quit menu has been divided in two, with all the status indicators now having their own Me Menu on the left and the current username shown next to a speech bubble as the heading/drop-down menu button. The Me Menu lists your username at the top, alongside a thumbnail image which you can personalize by clicking it. Underneath that is an input box where you can enter updates to Twitter, Facebook, and/or other similar sites once you have configured Ubuntu to access them. You can also directly enter any Chat or Broadcast accounts you have set up, or open Ubuntu One from here. To the right, all the user functions such as shutdown and restart are now selectable from the universal broken circle power button.

Although it shows as text, as soon as you pass your mouse over it, you’ll see that the date and time display is actually part of a button that brings up a calendar when clicked, as shown in Figure 4-22.

Figure 4-22. Ubuntu’s calendar

When you click any dates, the Evolution email groupware application is called up to help you manage appointments, tasks, and so on. If it’s the first time you’ve used it, you’ll be taken through a setup process before it opens.

If you just want to insert today’s date or time into a document, you can right-click the button and select either Copy Time or Copy Date.

The new mail icon (which looks like an unopened letter) is likely to be displayed immediately after installing Ubuntu because there is a friendly email from the Evolution email program developers waiting to be read. Once you have set up the program by providing your email account details, you’ll be able to view the welcome message, as well as your other emails.

Whether or not the sound volume icon is displayed seems to depend on your sound hardware. When it is visible, you can click it to slide the volume up and down, and right-clicking provides access to the Mute checkbox and the Sound Preferences window. If you did not hear an introductory tune when Ubuntu booted up and you have a working sound card, then most likely this checkbox will be selected, so look there first before investigating whether you have a hardware or driver issue.

If your computer has Bluetooth capability, you may also see a Bluetooth icon. You can click it to bring up a menu with which you can turn it on and off, send files and browse devices, set up new devices, and change your Bluetooth preferences (see Figure 4-23). For this icon, both the left and right mouse buttons pull up the same menu.

Figure 4-23. The Bluetooth menu

This icon changes according to the network hardware you have:

When you click the icon, a menu will open in which you can select the connections you require activated (see Figure 4-24). You can also configure VPN (Virtual Private Networking) from here, as well as connect to hidden wireless networks (those that do not broadcast their name) or create a new wireless network.

Figure 4-24. The Network Connections menu

Right-clicking brings up a different menu with which you can turn all networking (or just wireless networking) on and off. You can also view information about your connection and edit your connection settings. See Chapter 3 for more on this icon.

Whenever you wish to delete a file, just drag and drop it into the Trash and it will be deleted. But there’s a failsafe to prevent you from accidentally deleting files you didn’t mean to: erased files are stored in the Trash until you empty it by right-clicking the icon and selecting Empty Trash.

To restore or undelete a file, click the Trash icon and a window will open up displaying its contents (see Figure 4-26). You can then drag and drop the files shown to other places in the computer’s filesystem, or right-click any item for a list of further features, including options to permanently delete or restore a file. There is also an Empty Trash button in this window.

Figure 4-26. Restoring a deleted file

Using the workspace switcher, you can have multiple desktops (up to 36, in fact), each displaying different programs and windows. Each workspace is represented by an icon showing where the various windows are located within it. To switch between them, you can:

The icons on your desktop will remain where they are, but the open windows and programs will change.

There are also a number of ways you can move a window from one workspace to another. You can:

You can change the way your workspaces are laid out by right-clicking one of the workspace switcher icons in the bottom-righthand corner and selecting Preferences. A new Workspace Switcher Preferences window will then appear (see Figure 4-27). From here, you can effectively disable all additional workspaces by choosing to display only the current one, or change the number of rows and the total number of workspaces available.

Figure 4-27. The Workspace Switcher Preferences window

If you choose to have more than one row of workspaces, you’ll also find that all the previous key presses mentioned are augmented with Up arrow and Down arrow shortcuts to move or select workspaces above and/or below the current one. For example, you’ll be able to move a window up by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Up arrow.

You can also give each workspace different names from the rather inexpressive defaults, such as Desk 1 and Desk 2, and can choose between displaying either the icons or the workspace names.

The final icon in this desktop roundup is in the bottom-left corner, looking like a miniature representation of a monitor showing a desktop. You can click this icon to hide or reveal all the windows on the desktop at once. Each time you click it, Ubuntu toggles the desktop between the two states. This is a great feature when you need to quickly remove all windows to access an icon on the desktop, and then restore the windows back to where they were in order to continue working with them.

The Theme tab lets you choose between a selection of predefined themes, of which Human is the default. Try clicking different ones, and the desktop will change after a few seconds. For example, a good theme to choose for people with visual difficulties would be High Contrast Large Print Inverse. Whichever theme you choose will stay selected.

You can further modify a theme by clicking the Customize button, which brings up another window with five options (see Figure 4-31).

Figure 4-31. The Customize Theme window

The Background tab chooses which wallpaper (if any) to use, how to display it, and which color to use for the desktop background. Some wallpapers include transparency, so these choices are not mutually exclusive and can be combined. Figure 4-32 shows some of the several backgrounds supplied by default.

Figure 4-32. Changing the desktop background

You can choose between having the wallpaper tiled, zoomed, centered, scaled, or shown full screen by clicking the Style drop-down menu. Or you can choose a different image by either clicking one of the other wallpapers or clicking Add and browsing through the filesystem to locate a picture to use. Programs such as Firefox and the Image Viewer also have options to set the current image as the desktop background.

The Colors drop-down menu allows you to choose between a solid color and either a horizontal or vertical gradient for the background. A gradient shades gradually from one color to another. The box to the right can be clicked to select the actual color to use with a color picker, or you can type in its hexadecimal value (see Figure 4-33).

If you choose one of the gradients, two color boxes will be displayed next to the drop-down menu, one for each color in the gradient.

By the way, any background whose icon shows up as several images in a stack is just that: a group of images that will rotate at 30-minute intervals.

With the Fonts tab (see Figure 4-34), you can choose the default face and size of font to use for your applications, documents, desktop, window titles, and fixed-width text. Just click a font name and choose the new one. A window will then appear in which you can choose the font you want, whether it should appear by default in regular, bold, italic, or combined bold and italic style, and the size of the font. Click Cancel to return without making a change, or OK to make the change and go back.

Figure 4-33. The color picker

Figure 4-34. The Fonts tab

There’s also quite a clever feature below the fonts with which you can specify the type of font rendering you prefer. Not all monitors are the same, so try clicking the various choices to see which you prefer.

For even finer control, you can then click the Details button (see Figure 4-35) to tell Ubuntu the number of dots per inch your monitor displays, the type of smoothing to use, what hinting setting you prefer, and the subpixel order. The latter is a setting you make to match the order of the red, green, and blue components of each pixel on your monitor, as this varies by manufacturer.

Figure 4-35. Fine-tuning the rendering of fonts

The Interface tab (see Figure 4-36) lets you change the way some icons and menus appear. In the Menus and Toolbars section, you can check the “Show icons in menus” box to place an icon before each menu item.

Figure 4-36. Configuring the display of icons, menus, and toolbars

For example, Figure 4-37 shows what the Trash menu shown earlier in Figure 4-25 looks like with this box unchecked—notice how it’s a lot plainer. To my mind, the tiny amount of speed increase you might see by removing the icons is outweighed by the better look and feel and quicker comprehension that the icons’ visual cues provide.

Figure 4-37. The menu items in the Trash menu have been disabled

If you check the “Editable menu shortcut keys” box you can define new keyboard shortcuts for menu items. To change an application shortcut key, open the menu, and with the mouse pointer on the menu item you wish to change, press the new combination of keys. To remove a shortcut key, press Backspace or Delete.

Using the drop-down menu next to “Toolbar button labels,” you can further specify the appearance of toolbars by choosing whether text should appear below or beside items, and whether to display only text or only icons.

With the release of Ubuntu 10.04, the Interface tab is completely removed from the Appearance Preferences window. This was a decision taken by the GNOME development team, which decided that such options should be provided only by third-party user interface tweaking tools. However, you are able to access the setting directly with the GNOME Configuration Editor by pressing Alt-F2 and then entering gconf-editor. When the editor opens, drill down to desktop → gnome → interface and then either check or uncheck the box next to the entry “menus_have_icons”. You can also modify many other aspects of GNOME with this interface, but be very careful in case you mess up your desktop.

Depending on your hardware and the drivers installed, Ubuntu may be capable of providing enhanced visual effects (see Figure 4-38).

Figure 4-38. Setting the level of visual effects to use

The three levels of effects are:

Figure 4-39. Using the Extra Visual Effects setting gives you a Cover Flow–style task switcher

If you choose a setting that requires a graphics driver that isn’t already installed, Ubuntu will attempt to locate and install it. If it can’t do so, that setting won’t be available to you.

To add an item to a panel, right-click it and then select Add to Panel to bring up the Add to Panel window. Here, you can select from a wide range of launchers and applets, as shown in Figure 4-40.

Figure 4-40. The Add to Panel window

The first two options let you add an application of your choosing to the panel, either by creating a new launcher or by copying a launcher from the Applications menu. Alternatively, scroll down through the list of preselected applications and you may find the one you want already listed.

In fact, you can add more than applications using this window because it supports items such as a keyboard status indicator, a custom menu bar, a file searcher, Shut Down and Restart buttons, and many more.

There’s also an easy way to add any menu item to the top panel. Just locate the item using the mouse, right-click it, and select “Add this launcher to panel.”

To remove an item from the panel, right-click it and select Remove from Panel. Be careful, though, because you can remove the Quit menu and other important items that are not easy to restore using this feature.

To move an item to a different location in a panel, select Move and then use the mouse to move it left and right (or up and down) along the panel until you reach the desired destination, then click the left mouse button. Alternatively, you can drag and drop the icon into its new location.

If you wish to insert an item between two others that are right against each other, you will have to move them apart first to make room. Otherwise, you may end up dropping an item onto another, which would have the unwanted effect of opening up the latter item, passing the item dropped to it as if it were data to be acted on.

If you wish to prevent an item from being moved, right-click it and select “Lock to Panel.” Dragging and dropping that item will then be disabled. You may also need to uncheck this option to move items in the first place.

If you want to display a different icon for an item (or launcher) in a panel, right-click it and select Properties to bring up the launcher’s properties window. Now click the icon to bring up the icon browser, as shown in Figure 4-41. To reach the state shown in that figure, I created a new Calculator launcher in the top panel, opened up its properties window, and clicked its icon.

Figure 4-41. Changing a Launcher’s icon

After browsing through the icons and selecting the one you want, click OK to change the launcher’s icon. Otherwise, click Cancel to back out again without making any changes.

Incidentally, as you can see, this window also lets you change a panel item’s type, name, command (the command to issue or program to run), and tooltip comment.

Ubuntu’s panels are already powerful and versatile tools, but you can make them even more useful by adding drawers to them. These are drop-down menus in which you can store other items. To add a drawer to a panel, right-click it and select Add to Panel, then scroll down to the Drawer entry, select it, and click the Add button. A small icon that looks like an open drawer will then appear on the panel. If you click this icon, it will drop down an empty box, as there’s nothing in it.

To add items to the drawer, as you can probably guess, right-click it and select Add to Drawer. This will bring up a window almost exactly the same as the one shown in Figure 4-40, except it will have the title Add to Drawer, and that includes featuring the Drawer entry again so that you can add drawers within other drawers and so on. Mostly, though, you’ll want to add a selection of related items to a drawer.

To change a drawer’s icon, right-click it and select Properties. Then, click the Choose Icon button and proceed in the same way as described in the earlier section Changing a launcher’s icon. You can also change the drawer icon’s size and background color or image.

But that’s not all, because you can also add complete menus to the top panel by right-clicking a single item within a menu and then selecting “Entire menu.” From here, you can then choose to add the menu to the panel, either as a drawer or as a menu, as you can see from Figure 4-42.

Figure 4-42. Adding an entire menu to a panel

If you want to obtain a bit more desktop space, you can hide one or more of your panels by right-clicking one and selecting Properties, followed by checking the Autohide box. Then, click the Close button. The panel will disappear, but it can be brought back whenever you need it by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen and leaving it there. The panel will then slide into view and slide back again when you move the mouse away.

If you prefer, instead of checking the Autohide box, check the “Show hide buttons” box instead. This will place an arrow icon at the edge of the panel that, if you click it, will make the panel slide away lengthways to the screen’s edge, leaving only the arrow icon behind. Click it again to restore the panel.

When you right-click a panel and select Properties, you can also uncheck the Expand box, which will make the panel only as big as it needs to be to contain its contents. Or you can set the edge of the desktop (top, bottom, left, or right) to which the panel should be attached, and its width in pixels. Also, if you click the Background tab, you can change the panel’s background color and transparency or image.

To change the icon for a menu entry, first select the menu in the lefthand pane of the editor, and then select the entry within that menu in the righthand pane. You can now click the Properties button (or right-click the item and select Properties) to bring up the Launcher Properties window shown in Figure 4-41. To edit the icon, follow the procedure outlined in the earlier section Changing a launcher’s icon.

In this window, you can also edit the launcher’s type, name, the command used to launch a program, and the tooltip comment for the entry.

To move an entry, select it in the righthand pane and then click the Move Up or Move Down button until it is in the desired location.

If you wish to delete an entry, simply select it and click the Delete button. Be careful, though, as there is no “Are you sure?” warning for this action.

To add a new submenu, highlight the position where you want it to be inserted and click the New Menu button. A window will pop up asking you to enter a name and comment to be displayed as a tooltip, which you should fill in before clicking OK to create the menu. Click Cancel to return without making a change.

To add a new item to a menu, move to the place where you want it inserted and click the New Item button. A new window will pop up entitled Create Launcher, which is identical to the one shown in Figure 4-41, except that all of the fields are blank and need to be filled in. To complete the process, you will need to enter the entry’s type, name, and comment, as well as the command required to launch the item. The command is the critical piece of information you need to know; if you don’t have that information, click Cancel and see whether you can figure out the command after reading Chapter 7. Otherwise, enter the information and click the OK button to add the item.