Kubuntu Guide 07

Before we get started, this is now a good time to move your files onto the system. Insert your backup device and wait for the Device Notifier on the Panel to let you know you can open this thing with the file manager, which is called Dolphin. When the window is open, you need to make it pretty large, so either drag the corners to stretch or hit the maximize button on the frame, pretty much where you expect it to be. Then find the “Split” icon and click that. This will give you a double-pane window. Click whichever side you like and click the “Home” button. One pane displays the contents of your backup device and the other is your basic Home directory. Naturally, this is different from Windows, but you’ll find the usual folders for your stuff: Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos and one labeled Public. The last one, in theory, is where you dump all the stuff you intend to share if your machine is networked for sharing.

You can decide for yourself where to put everything. Don’t copy over your saved font files; we’ll get to those in a moment. Leave your device plugged in for now and let’s close the Dolphin window. In the future, you can find Dolphin under System in the menu.

However, System Settings is under Settings. Open this and you’ll see something like the Windows Control Panel. Feel free to explore the items, but of particular interest is that the desktop appearance as a whole is not all in one place. Some Windows users find the default decorations a bit glitzy, so we have a couple of places to go to tame it. In the top row is “Application Appearance.” Clicking on that changes the window to something you saw earlier with the Desktop settings. First is Style; you get a preview of what this changes and what it looks like. Pick one. The second tab for Fine Tuning will probably not mean much right now, so you can skip that. The defaults usually work just fine.

Under colors are several schemes and you can adjust any of them. For example, a lot of folks like darker shades of gray on the various windows and widgets. Click the Colors tab and then find Window Background. Click the colored rectangle on the right and open a color adjustment dialog. The vertical slider on the right there will allow you to change to a darker or lighter shade. Inside the rainbow patch is a marker of some sort to indicate the basic hue. You could waste a lot of time here, but it’s all about making yourself happy with what you see. Once you’ve finished playing with the color scheme, you might want to save it. There’s a button for that and it will prompt you for a new name. Call it what you like, but something different from what is already listed.

Icons shows only one theme and you can download others. You can also adjust the default size of the icons, separately from what shows up on the desktop background. Notice the Fonts dialog, but we’ll need to come back later after we add your Windows fonts. Trust me, they often look better than the bundled free fonts from Ubuntu.

The GTK options reflect something you don’t see in Windows at all. There are two very dominant graphics toolkits on most Linux distributions. KDE relies heavily on something called QT; we’ve been fooling with that all along. However, a lot of applications are built with a different toolkit called GTK. GTK comes in versions 2 and 3. Try not to get bogged down on this, but if you install anything related to the Mozilla Project — Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, etc. — you’ll see the colors affected by the GTK 2 settings. You can hunt down new color themes for that here, but most of the labels won’t tell you much about what you are getting. The defaults shown in the settings here aren’t too bad. I already knew long ago that I preferred Dirty Ice and installed it myself; you can learn how here. Again, you decide how much time you want to spend on such minutiae. Similar refinements are possible with the Emoticons settings.

In the upper left-hand corner you can hit the “Overview” button to return to the System Settings window. Just below Application Appearance is Workspace Appearance. There are four items here. Window Decorations is mostly about the frames of the application windows. You’ll probably be most familiar with Plastik. You can reconfigure the buttons if you like; see the button for that at the bottom. You can install more, but it requires perusing a list that does little to give you any idea what you are getting. It really depends on your taste and the amount of time you have for it.

Cursor Theme is mostly a matter of color and style of images. Obscure point: In Linux, this is actually handled like a font. For Desktop Themes, it’s fairly subtle and hard to describe, but it changes the basic coloration and 3D texture of things. Again, getting new themes opens an installer with too small of a preview size to tell much. For now, let me suggest you use Air for netbooks. Most Windows users don’t care for Oxygen. The Splash Screen is simply the decorative box you see when booting up, showing the system coming to life.

If you are annoyed by the windows maximizing when you drag them to the top of the screen, go back to the Overview of System Settings and select Workspace Behavior. Select Screen Edges and de-select the two boxes under “Window Management.” Now go back up to Virtual Desktops in that left window pane. This is where you can decide how many virtual desktops you need. However, it’s pretty much useless if you didn’t add the Pager widget to you Panel. Go back and do that now, but first decide where you want those multiple desktops rendered on the Panel. What the Pager widget does is display a tiny preview of each virtual desktop in the Panel. Click on the one you want and the screen displays it above the Panel.

Returning to the Overview, we see down near the bottom is Font Management. Open this dialog. At the bottom is an “Add” button. Click this and you’ll open a small file manager window. By default it displays the contents of your Documents folder. To the left is a gray section with icons, and one of them should indicate your backup device still plugged into the computer. Click that and navigate as you would in Windows to your fonts collection — again, it’s all single-click. If you find them and type CTRL+A it will select them all. Now click the “Open” button and proceed to install them for your personal use. Almost immediately they will appear in the listing and be available for display.

Now you can go back Application Appearance settings to the Fonts window and change any of the items to your favorite Windows fonts. But there is one more important issue: font rendering. To be honest, Kubuntu does this far better than Windows. Below the list of font options is something about anti-aliasing. Enable it. Now click that Configure button and open a tiny dialog. The business about excluding certain size ranges is a holdover from the days when almost no one had an LCD/LED monitor, so you can probably ignore that. However, change the Hinting Style to “Full” and see what a difference it makes. Now go back to the GTK settings and change the fonts and sizes there, too, because chances are the defaults are too big.

Going back to the Overview, you’ll find the screensaver controls under Display and Monitor, but you’ll need to make sure the settings don’t conflict with what happens under the Power Management settings. These two are generally self-explanatory. However, you can have a lot more choices with screensavers and we’ll fix that later. For now, check out the Input Devices dialog. If you have a touchpad, this is where KDE shines, offering very finely detailed control over how it works. If you prefer a trackball, as I do, unfortunately we’ll have to work on that later.

The final item is printing. It would be easy to write a whole new book on this issue alone. It’s easily one of the biggest weaknesses in Linux, particularly in that things get very complicated very fast if automated processes don’t find and identify your printer. The default settings are usually at the lowest end, so be sure to check on that if your printer is already configured. If you have problems, be aware that several of the major printer manufacturers have in the past few years added specific Linux drivers and control packages. Check the manufacturer’s website. You might consider using a search engine with the printer model and Linux and/or Ubuntu as search terms. Sometimes this yields pages where someone else has already faced the grief and found a solution. Should you wish to connect with a shared printer on a Windows computer in your home network, we’ll have to add a package not installed by default.

We’ll cover software management in the next lesson.