Chapter 8. Linux for Beginners

Table of Contents
8.1. Introduction
8.2. Beginning and Ending your Session
8.2.1. Identify Yourself
8.2.2. Close your Session
8.2.3. Some Notes About Security
8.3. Using Your Graphical Environment
8.3.1. Elements Displayed
8.3.2. Managing Windows and Desktops
8.3.3. Personalizing Your Desktop
8.3.4. Accessing Programs

8.1. Introduction

This chapter is written for inexperienced beginners. If you know how to create an icon on the desktop, skip ahead to the next chapter. If not, read on :-)

If we took for granted that all users know how to operate Windows, it would have been easier to write this chapter. Instead, we decided to write everything from scratch. Hence, any user, experienced or not (who barely knows how to move the mouse pointer across a screen), can launch programs, properly close them and shut down the computer. After reading this chapter, all subsequent ones will make much more sense to you.

We assume that you are sitting in front of a running Mandrake Linux computer which, when turned on, automatically displays the graphic login screen. The latter shows a little box in the middle of your screen and holds two fields tagged as login and password. This is what you should see if you previously followed the Installation Guide procedure.

Given the large number of graphical interfaces available under GNU/Linux, it is impossible to document them all. We will discuss two of the most popular ones: KDE and GNOME.


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