Default Linux Account Tips

Virtual Desktops

You are looking at one of 4 virtual desktops. The other 3 are hidden, but you can switch desktops at any time. It is like having a pile of 4 pieces of paper that you can shuffle so that at any time one is always on top.

On this desktop, aside from the browser window in which you are reading this, there should also be two terminal windows. These are "xterms" or "command shells," or just "shells." One is labeled console and the other is labeled with the name of the machine you are logged into.

Across the bottom, from right to left, there is a clock, a miniture view of what is happening on all four pages (called a pager), a list of what is happening on the page you are presently looking at, and an email notifier.

You can move from one page to another by pressing keys F1 - F4 which are located in the top row of your keyboard, or by left clicking the corresponding area within the pager.

You can move a window from one page to another by clicking and holding any mouse button on the title bar of the window, drag it to the edge of the screen, wait a second, and release the button when the window is located where you want it. Or, you can middle click the window's icon within the pager and drag that icon to another page within the pager.

3 Button Mousing

Three mouse buttons are used with Linux, and what they do is context-dependent. That is, each button can do something different depending upon whether it is on the background, a window's titlebar or the window proper.

Here's a quick guide to get you started with our defaults:

	Mouse Buttons
	Left	Middle	Right
Background	popup windowing menu	popup window list	popup utilities menu
Window	raise/move window	move window	lower/move window

To resize a window place the cursor anywhere on the outer edge of the window and notice that it changes to an arrow. At that point you should click and hold any button, move the mouse, and release the button when the window is the size you want.

Some Linux Commands

In a shell, you type commands. Try listing the files in your account:

% ls

The Linux filesystem is organized as a hierarchy of folders, called "directories," and you can move into a directory by typing

% cd directory

In every directory, there is a special directory named ".." which is that directories parent, and you move upward by cd'ing into it:

% cd ..

Check ... for more help with Linux.

To edit files, you'll want to learn to use emacs or vim. You can get by with a simpler editor, like pico, but serious Linux users, and especially programmers, prefer a more industrial-strength editor.

More Linux Information

UNIX in a Nutshell from O'Reilly is a good book to try.