Ubuntu: Up and Running

Chapter 4. The Desktop: Accessing Applications and Features

Long gone are the days when Linux was considered the exclusive domain of highly technical and skilled programmers. Nowadays, we have desktops that provide easy and intuitive interfaces to all their functions, in much the same way as we now expect from any other modern OS, such as Windows or Mac OS X. Xfce, KDE, and the default Ubuntu desktop, GNOME, have been developed through many years of cooperative labor and take advantage of the most advanced graphics cards.

In particular, the GNOME environment of Ubuntu 10.04 represents the leading edge of Linux desktops, and this chapter will help you to thoroughly familiarize yourself with how it works and what it has to offer.

Logging In

You may wonder why there’s a whole section on logging in. Well, it’s because you can do more than just log in at this screen, as you can see from Figure 4-1. I’ve set up my system so the login screen already shows the user Robin and is waiting for a password to be entered. But at the bottom of the screen are a number of options you can use to modify your login session. So,s before getting on with the logging in itself, let’s look at them in turn.

Language

By clicking the Language drop-down menu at the bottom left of the screen (displaying the country United States in the screen grab,) you can change the language you will be using, which is useful if you need to work in more than one language. For example, Canadians might need to use both English and ...