Ubuntu: Up and Running

The Desktop Itself

So far I’ve talked a lot about things relating to the desktop but not so much about the desktop itself and what you can do with it.

After a new install, your desktop will likely have nothing on it, unless you have a CD-ROM or other drive mounted, in which case you might see an icon for it that you can click to browse its files.

Creating Folders, Launchers, and Files

So, let’s put something on the desktop by right-clicking it to bring up the context menu shown in Figure 4-45. Click Create Folder, and when the new folder appears with the words “untitled folder” highlighted, replace that text with something meaningful, such as “Test Folder.”

Figure 4-45. Right-clicking the desktop brings up this context menu

Now double-click the folder to open it up, and an empty file browser window will open. The first thing you might want to do at this point is something I always do after a fresh install: enable Ubuntu to respond to single-clicks instead of always requiring double-clicks.

If you want to make your installation work this way, click the Edit menu and select Preferences to bring up the window shown in Figure 4-46. Several options become available to you here under various tabs, which I’ll explain in Chapter 6, but for now just select the Behavior tab, check “Single-click to open items,” and then click Close. If you won’t be using it, you may wish to delete the test folder ...