Your Linux box can be used to gain access to the World Wide Web. How to connect to the Internet is not covered here (it's done in another chapter), but we'll show you how you can use the various KDE tools for this.
Of course, you can still use Netscape which is included in your Linux Mandrake. But you have another web browser, far more complete and - hopefully - more stable. But you already know it: In fact, it's Konqueror itself !
Launch Konqueror, for instance by clicking on your Home Directory icon: It doesn't matter. Just under the tool bar, you see the location bar: You may have noticed it was always showing the current working directory. Now place your mouse cursor in this field. Erase everything using the Delete or Backspace keys, then type www.portalux.com, or any web site address you wish, then press the Enter key.
A few seconds later, you're in front of one of the most famous Linux portal! You'll find in Konqueror a great, feature-rich web browser.
Like any other web browser, Konqueror allows you to create, reuse and maintain a pool of bookmarks: Direct access to commonly visited web sites.
To add a bookmark is very simple: While you're viewing a web page, choose Bookmarks in the menu bar, then simply Add bookmark. If you wish, you can organize your bookmarks in directories, here called "folders". Choose New folder, enter a folder name, and that's it! You can access each folder you create through the Bookmarks menu, by simply clicking on their names. Notice that each of them offers you the ability to add bookmarks, or create sub-folders.
If you want to reorganize your bookmarks, or delete some, then use Edit bookmarks: You'll get a Konqueror-like window, where each folder is like a directory, and each bookmark is like a file. You can manipulate them in the same way that you manipulate files.
As a final note, you can see that you can access to the Netscape's bookmarks, so if you have an old database, it won't be lost. But you can't add bookmarks to Netscape from Konqueror, or edit them.
It's very likely that you will want one day to download files from the Internet; that is, getting files from "somewhere" to have them on your hard drive.
Again, Konqueror is the tool for you, whether you need to download from a Web site or an FTP site. The idea is this: Split your window. In the menu bar, choose the Window menu, then inside click on Split view top/bottom. You can see the right panel being divided in two parts, containing the same thing: You split the panel, each new one has its own status bar.
Click on the top panel's status bar: The top panel is now the active one. In the location field, enter the URL of the web site you want to download from, for instance http://www.linuxdoc.org/guides.html . Click on the bottom panel status bar, then on your Home Directory icon. You should now see in the bottom you personal files and directories. Select the directory you wish to download to.
Now, the hard part. Find a link to something to download in the web page: In our example, the site is holding many documentation related to Linux. You should find such links by browsing a few lines down, labelled like HTML (tarred and gzipped). Got it? Good. Now bring your mouse cursor on the link, press the left mouse button, and "drag" [1] it in the bottom panel, then release the button. You're prompted to choose what you want to do : choose Copy. A window appears with a progress bar to show you what percentage of the file has been copied.
And that's it! You may now click on the file to see its content. That was not so hard, was it? The procedure is the same if you're downloading from an FTP site, just take care to start the address with ftp:// instead of http://.
If you want to close one of the sub panels, just right-click on its status bar, then choose Remove active view.
[1] | If you don't remember, this means to move the mouse while keeping the left button down. |