Table of Contents
Your computer comes with several applications installed. The following sections will document some basic information about some of these applications, so that you can start using the applications quickly. We will focus on the basics: what the application is for, how to start and exit it, the basic layout of the program, how to save and retrieve data, and confusing program quirks.
In general, we will not discuss advanced usage or configuration of the application. Where possible, we will point you to further resources so that you can learn more. In addition to reading documentation, don't be afraid to play: exploring the program menus and trying stuff out is one of the best ways to learn about your software.
The set of applications installed on your computer might be different than the applications that we discuss below. The number and selection of programs installed on your computer depends on the size of your hard drive, and how your computer was configured when the software was installed. If you have a smaller (500MB - 1GB) hard drive on your computer, you can expect to have fewer applications, and if your computer's hard drive is large (over 3 GB) then you may find extra programs installed.
Productivity software refers to applications that you might use in an office or at school. It includes word processors and file managers, but does not include Internet applications (which have their own section).
AbiWord is a word processor. With it, you can enter, edit, and typeset documents such as letters, essays, and resumes. Although it is not the most sophisticated word processor in the world, it supports many of the features people expect in a modern word processor -- spell checking, tables, image insertion, and some fancy formatting. If you are starting out with computers you will probably find AbiWord a good way to develop your word processing skills, practice your typing, and produce professional-looking documents.
You can start AbiWord in three ways: by clicking on the button on the toolbar [SCREENSHOT], by selecting the menu item from the program menu [SCREENSHOT], or by typing abiword in a command-line window. A splash screen should come up, followed by the main AbiWord screen. [SCREENSHOT]
To exit AbiWord, select the -> menu item. If you have unsaved work, AbiWord will prompt you to save your work or explicitly discard it. [SCREENSHOT]
AbiWord provides two different ways to save your work. Choosing -> will allow you to give a name to your document. You can use this to save different versions of your document with different names. If your document already has a name, -> will save your progress. Both of these options have buttons on the main menu bar for quick access. [SCREENSHOT]
When you select the option, a dialog box will pop up and you will be prompted for a name and format for your file. You can use the Folders window to find a directory for your document. The Files window shows files in the current directory. Enter a name for the file in the Selection box. [SCREENSHOT] shows an example of this dialog box. In this example, we are saving the document in /home/linuxuser/My_Documents and naming the document demonstration.rtf .
The "rtf" at the end of demonstration.rtf stands for Rich Text Format. By default, we have configured AbiWord to save files in this format. If we named the document demo instead, then AbiWord will add the ".rtf" at the end, so the file will have the name demo.rtf .
Rich text format is well-supported by AbiWord and many other word processors. This makes it easy for you to open your documents in other word processors for printing or viewing by others. Although AbiWord is capable of saving to other formats, we recommend using Rich Text Format unless you have a good reason not to. In particular, the "Microsoft Word" save format does not work very well, and the "AbiWord" save format is not recognised by many other word processors.
Your best defence against computer crashes is to save your work frequently. The more frequently you save the less work you will lose in the event of a crash. Having said that, if AbiWord crashes before you have saved your work there may be some hope. Every five minutes AbiWord creates backup files of your working documents. With a bit of luck, you can use these backups to retrieve some of your lost work.
AbiWord appends a .bak~ to the names of the files it backs up. For example, the backup file for demo.rtf will be named demo.rtf.bak~. These backup files are placed in the same directory as the original file.
If your document does not have a name, AbiWord makes backup files called Untitled1.bak~, Untitled2.bak~ and so on. It leaves these files in your home directory.
The next time you start AbiWord, you can open these backup files as you would any other document. [SCREENSHOT] If you find that this file contains lost work, use the button to save the document with a new name. You can then copy and paste the changes to your original document.
You can configure AbiWord to autosave your work more frequently by selecting the -> menu, then selecting the Preference Schemes tab. [SCREENSHOT] Just change the Auto save current file every 5 minutes entry to some other number.
AbiWord comes with informative tooltips. Hover your mouse over the different buttons to see what they do. This is one of the best ways to explore AbiWord's features.
AbiWord also comes with help files that describe its functions in some detail. You can access this help from the -> menu entry. The contains other useful entries as well. However, note that the , , and entries of the menu require Internet access to work correctly.
Depending on the size of your hard drive, you may also have some AbiWord tutorials installed. Some of these tutorials are in HTML format, and some in AbiWord's native file format. You can access the HTML tutorials from the entry of the IceWM program menu. You can access the AbiWord formatted tutorials in the /usr/share/doc/abiword-doc/ directory. [SCREENSHOT] These tutorials vary in quality; some of them describe older versions of the program, and so some of the information may be out of date.
XFE is a graphical file manager. It allows you to organize files into directory, rename files, copy, move, and delete files, and navigate through the directory tree.
Before reading this section, you may want to familiarize yourself with the "Files and Directories" and "Moving Files to and from Floppy Disks" sections of the "Basics" chapter. [LINK] These sections introduce concepts we will use in this section.
To start XFE, select the entry from the IceWM program menu. [SCREENSHOT?] You can exit XFE by selecting ->
XFE starts by displaying the contents of your home directory. [LABELLED SCREENSHOT] The Folders panel on the left shows the Linux directory tree, which you can navigate by clicking folders. The right panel shows the contents of the current selected directory, and the Location bar allows you to change the current directory by typing a new location manually. Above the location bar is a toolbar which provides one-click access to some common functions. You can discover the purposes of these buttons by hovering your mouse over them. [SCREENSHOTS]
Most operations in XFE deal with sets of files. You select a file by first navigating to its directory, and then single-clicking the file. You can also select multiple files by holding the Ctrl key and clicking each file you want to include. Selecting multiple files comes in handy when moving files, copying files and creating archives. [SCREENSHOT]
Once you have selected the files you wish to manipulate, let go of the Ctrl key and right-click the mouse. This brings up a menu that lists the operations you can perform. [SCREENSHOT]
Directories help keep your data files organized by project or purpose. For example, the linuxuser account in [SCREENSHOT] has three subdirectories in its home directory: one called My_Documents for documents and personal data files, one called downloads for information downloaded from the Internet, and one called working for no good reason.
To create a directory, first navigate to the location where the directory is to be created. Then right-click and select . [SCREENSHOT] A dialog box pops up with your current location (which is known as the path). [SCREENSHOT] Add the name of your directory to the end of the path. In the example, /home/linuxuser/My_Documents is the path and exampledir is the name of our new directory. [SCREENSHOT] Click to finish the operation.
The difference between copying and moving a file is small but important. When you copy a file in Linux, you two distinct instances of that file -- one in the original location, and one in the new location. When you move a file, the file exists only in the new location. Often, you copy files when making backups or when transferring your data to a different medium such as a floppy disk. You move files to reorganize them.
Copying and moving files is best done using the "tree and two panels" view of XFE. To activate this view, press Ctrl-F2 or click the following toolbar button [SCREENSHOT].
To carry out the file copy or move, use one panel (we'll say the right panel) to navigate to the original file location, and the left panel to navigate to the destination. Select the file (or files) you wish to copy or move, then right-click and select the operation you want. Next, click in the destination panel and select . [SCREENSHOT] A dialog box will pop up asking for confirmation; click to do the operation.
If there are already files in the destination directory whose names match the files you are copying or moving, you will get a warning dialog. [SCREENSHOT] If you choose or then you will overwrite the files in the destination directory. Sometimes this is safe and sometimes this is not -- if you are unsure about whether you should overwrite a particular file, you should select and verify that it is safe for you to overwrite the file in question.
XFE provides several ways to rename a file. You can right-click a file and select the option, but the associated dialog box is confusing. Instead, right-click the file and select the the option. [SCREENSHOT] A dialog box with three tabs pops up. You can change the name of the file by altering the Name field of the General tab. [SCREENSHOT]
The steps in deleting a file are similar to those of moving or copying a file: select the file to delete, right-click, and select .
Beware: the "recycle bin" icon in the deletion dialog window is misleading. [SCREENSHOT] There is no "recycle bin". For all practical purposes, once you delete your files they are gone for good.
Archive files serve two purposes: they collect related data files together and they compress data so it takes up less disk space. Archive files have many uses. Here are some examples:
There are three archive formats that are widely used in the Linux world. Each format has advantages and disadvantages, and tends to be used in different situations:
The zip format has been around since the DOS days, and it is widely supported. Zip archives are often called zipfiles, and they usually end with a .zip extension.
Windows XP now supports zip archives natively, as do most unzip programs. For this reason, zip archives may be your best choice if you are transferring archives to an unknown computer running an unknown operating system. In particular, the zip format is one of the most widely-used formats in the Windows world.
Unfortunately not every computer has zip archive support, and if you want to guarantee compatibility you may need to avoid archives entirely.
The big disadvantage of zip files is that they do not compress data as well as the other formats. In the Linux and UNIX worlds, zipfiles are less widely supported than tarfiles, so if you know you are transferring files to a machine running Linux or UNIX, you probably want to use a tar format.
The gzipped tar format is made up of two parts. The "tar" part refers to the archiving program, which is called tar and is an acronym for "tape archive". The "gzip" part refers to the compression scheme. These archives are often called tarballs, and the files themselves either end with .tar.gz or .tgz extensions.
Gzipped tar files are the standard archive format for distributing files in the UNIX and Linux worlds. In the Windows world, the popular archive program WinZip supports gzipped tar files, and many other archivers do as well. Windows XP does not support the format natively, however.
Gzipped tar files are quick to create, and they offer significantly better compression over zipfiles. Although bzip2 offers better compression, gzipped tarballs are a useful format both for distributing files and for long-term storage.
The bzipped tar format also uses the tar format to collect files together, but the data is compressed using the "bzip2" file compression scheme. These archives generally end with the .tar.bz2 extension, although other extensions (such as .tbz2) are also supported.
The bzip2 compression scheme has been around for several years now, but it is much newer than either the gzip or the zip formats, and as such it is as not widely supported as either of these two formats. [DOES WINZIP SUPPORT bz2?] For this reason bzipped tarballs are not most people's first choice when transferring files (although it is becoming more popular).
Bzipped tar files are good for long-term data storage. The compression tends to be better than gzipped tar files. This can result in significant disk savings for large archives that are not accessed frequently. The biggest disadvantage of the bzip2 scheme is that the compression process is fairly slow. (Uncompression is fast, however.) For casual, short-term storage, the gzip standard is faster and more widely supported. However, on your own machine bzipped tar archives make a lot of sense as an archival format.
The amount of compression you get with an archive depends on the type of files you are archiving. Some file types -- especially multimedia files such as PNGs, JPEGs, MP3s and MPEGs -- are already compressed, and thus will not compress any further when put into a compressed archive. Most other data files will compress a fair amount.
XFE is capable of compressing and uncompressing archives in any of these formats. It determines the type of archive to create or uncompress based on the file extension. [SCREENSHOT] shows the directory lxsplit-0.1.1 directory archived in the three formats, and an archive called axxrom-default-1.4.tar.gz in .tar.gz format.
To extract an archive in XFE first select the archive file, then right click and select [SCREENSHOT]. A directory tree will pop up. Select the directory to which you want to extract the archive, and click . [SCREENSHOT]
If you are unsure of the contents of the archive, you might want to extract the archive to /tmp, or to create a temporary directory into which you extract the archive. Zipfiles in particular have a nasty habit of not creating their own subdirectories, which leads to a mess of files dumped in your destination directory. This can be dangerous: if you have a file in your destination directory whose name matches some file in the archive, your file will be overwritten.
After you have selected an appropriate destination directory, XFE will list the files it extracted [SCREENSHOT] You can then traverse to your destination directory and use the files in the archive. [SCREENSHOT]
Before creating an archive, you should first organize the files that will go into the archive. Copy or move the files so they all sit in a single directory. The idea is to archive the directory, which will make your life easier when you choose to open the archive again.
Once you have created the archival directory, right-click the directory and select . [SCREENSHOT] A (rather confusing) dialog box will pop up, asking you for an archive name. This dialog box wants you to type both the full location of the archive file -- both the path and the filename. If you don't have a particular location in mind, you can create the archive in /tmp and move it from there once it has been created. (Note that you cannot use /tmp for long-term storage -- it is cleared every time you reboot your computer.)
The name of the file is important -- XFE chooses the archive based on the file extension.
In [SCREENSHOT] we create an archive of the /tmp/axxrom-1.4 directory in the /home/linuxuser/downloads directory named axxrom.tar.bz2 . Since the extension is .tar.bz2, XFE will create a bzipped tar archive. [SCREENSHOT]
After selecting the filename, XFE lists the files it has archived. The archive should then live in your destination directory.
You may want to test the success of the archiving process by extracting your new archive to some new directory (perhaps a subdirectory in /tmp . Verify that the files you wanted archived were actually archived correctly. If you were archiving your files to save disk space, you can then delete the original directory.
XFE is capable of associating files with applications. For example, double-clicking a document in Rich Text Format will launch AbiWord. [SCREENSHOT]
In some cases (such as with picture and music files) you don't want to edit the file -- you just want to view it. Sometimes right-clicking and selecting will open an application that will allow you to see the files without being able to change them. [SCREENSHOT AND EXAMPLE]
You can view the file associations for a particular file by right-clicking the file, selecting and clicking the File Associations tab. [SCREENSHOT] The entries for "Open", "View" and "Edit" correspond to the names of programs on your system as you would type them on the command line. Although it is possible to edit these entries, most beginning users will not want to. It often takes some fiddling to get the entries correct.