From The Chakra Project

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Contents 1 The Lay of the Land 1.1 Checking Out the Apps 1.2 Where the Heck Are My Files? 1.3 The Activities Manager Icon 1.4 The System Tray 1.5 The Device Notifier 1.6 Running Upgrades 1.7 The Root Account 1.8 Getting Out 1.9 The Bare Necessities

The Lay of the Land

Before we go too far we ought to take a quick look around the desktop. You're probably eager to try out all of the great free software that's available for Chakra Linux, and that's what the next chapter is all about... but I think everything will be easier if we do a basic sort of orientation on the desktop environment first.

Before we get started I want to remind you of something I mentioned in the installation tutorial. KDE is a single-click environment, which takes some getting used to but ultimately will reduce your risk of carpal tunnel, tendinitis, and other nasty repetitive strain injuries. We can change the settings if you absolutely can't get used to it, but give it an honest try first.

Checking Out the Apps

Despite the minimal install, there are a few applications installed on your Chakra box. To access them we can use the Kickoff Application Launcher, which is in the exact same place you would find the Windows start menu on a Microsoft box... on the panel at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen (the square blue thing). Click on it and the menu will pop up:

The menu opens to "Favorites", which is a nice dumping ground for apps that you use a lot. Chakra has stuck a handful of them in there for you, but you can remove an app from the favorites list by right-clicking on it's icon and selecting "Remove From Favorites". Now hover your cursor over the "Applications" tab (you don't have to click it) and the main Applications menu will display:

Notice how the apps are sorted into nice, neat categories by type. Click on "Multimedia":

The only multimedia programs installed by default are the Kmix sound mixer and the Bangarang media player. Kmix is what you'll use to adjust your volume levels, and Bangarang is a very basic digital media app. Right-click on Kmix and take a look at the context menu options; you can add a Kmix icon to the panel, to the desktop, or to the "Favorites" dialog we just looked at. To return to the main Applications menu go to the upper right-hand corner of the whitespace and click "All Applications". Now hover your cursor over "Recently Used"; this provides quick access to any apps you've opened recently.

I should point out here that not everyone digs the Kickoff menu, but it's very easy to switch to a different application launcher. Not like Windows, where you're stuck with the start menu! I'll talk more about menu options in the Desktop Setup lesson. Anyway, go back to the "Applications" section of the launcher, and make sure you're looking at the list of application categories. Here's a list of the application categories in your menu, and the apps that are pre-installed in each category on a fresh Chakra installation:

Chakra: The stuff in here is mostly just links that will open various parts of the Chakra website in a browser. In particular you might want to check out "Documentation", which links to the Chakra Wiki.

Education: There's only one app in here by default, sub-categorized under "Miscellaneous": the Marble Globe virtual globe program, which is a geographical tool that displays a globe of the world and can find locations on it.

Graphics: There are a few cool apps in here. They are:

• Xgps: A GPS program... well, actually two GPS programs: Xgps and Xgpsspeed. I've never tried 'em, but they'd probably come in handy if you're mobile a lot.

• Gwenview image viewer: the default KDE image viewer is a simple yet powerful app that not only lets you look at your pictures but also has some very basic photo editing tools. There's a great plugin package you can install that allows you to interface seemlessly with social networking sites and stuff like that.

• Ksnapshot: This is the KDE screen capture app. It allows you to easily select the area of the screen you want to shoot, and the same plugin that allows you to export pictures all over the place using Gwenview adds the same functionality to this one.

Internet: The "Internet" category is fairly well-stocked, an acknowledgment of the importance of the web in modern computing. The apps in here are:

• BlueDevil bluetooth stack: The KDE app for synching with bluetooth devices.

• Quassel IRC client: Most free software projects consist of developers who live all over the world and often have never met face-to-face. They routinely communicate using live IRC chats, and Quassel is the app for the job. This will allow you to get directly in touch with the developers of the software you use if need be. The menu offers the complete version containing the core/server component, along with the "client only" version.

• KNetAttach network folder wizard: The KDE network folder wizard is for managing... you guessed it... your network folders! If you're like most people you probably don't have any.

• Rekonq web browser: A modern web browser replacing the venerable Konqueror web browser. Rekonq runs the WebKit rendering agent similar to Safari and Google Chrome.

Multimedia: The only things in here are the aforementioned Kmix sound mixer and Bangarang media player.

Settings: This one contains the System-settings, a later chapter will be explaining in depth about this application, and if you choose to install a GUI for pacman, it will contain Apper.

System: This is where system administration stuff can be found. These aren't apps, they're utilities, but you'll find them handy as time goes on. Here's what you've got (not necessarily in order):

• Bundle Manager: Certain software for Chakra comes in the form of bundles, and this is a nice little management utility for them.

• Dolphin: The KDE file manager.

• KDE Partition manager: You used this one when you installed Chakra, remember? It's for working with hard disc partitions.

• KInfoCenter: This displays information about your computer's hardware.

• Konsole: This is a terminal emulator, which allows you to access a command-line console without having to log out of your graphical session.

• KRandRTray: Allows quick access to monitor and resolution settings.

• KUser: The KDE user and group account manager.

• miniBackup: A tool for backing up your sytem settings and personal data.

• Nepomuk Backup: I'm not going to get into what Nepomuk is right now, but this backup utility automatically backs up your data for you.

• System Monitor: A tool for monitoring system processes.

Utilities: This is sort of a dumping ground for stuff that doesn't quite fit under "Sytem", but doesn't really belong anyplace else, either.

• Ark: the KDE archiving tool; this is what you use to compress, decompress, and archive data.

• Kate: This is a text editor, similar to Microsoft Notepad but about a zillion times more capable.

• KGpg: An encryption tool.

• Klipper: The clipboard tool; this is where stuff goes when you right-click on something and select "Copy".

• Sweeper: A system cleanup utility that'll clean out your caches and cookies and stuff.

A Few Odds and Ends: At the bottom of the Applications menu there's the "Find Files/Folders" search utility, and below that the KDE help center. Now go back to "Favorites" for a second. There you'll see a utility that isn't in the Applications menu (this seems to be unique to the Kickoff menu; using any other menu style it shows up under "Settings"). That's the System Settings dialog, which is where you'll go to tweak your desktop to your liking.

Where the Heck Are My Files?

I hear this from new Linux users all the time. The answer is simple: in your user home directory. Every user has their very own home directory (or folder, if you prefer), and there's a couple of easy ways you can access yours. One way is to use the Kickoff menu. Open it and hover your cursor over "Computer":

This part of the menu gives you quick access to the filesystem, as well as some basic system administration utilities. Up at the top under "Applications" you can access the System Settings dialog or the Krunner program, which allows you to type terminal commands without actually opening up a terminal (and does a whole bunch of other neat stuff; more on Krunner in another lesson). The stuff we're interested in right now is below that under "Places"; clicking on any of these icons will open the specified location using the Dolphin file manager. The blue folder labeled "Home" takes you to your user home directory, where all of your personal files are stored. The "Network" globe will access any network folders you may have, the red "Root" folder opens the root directory (which contains the whole filesystem), and the "Trash" can is, well, the trash. Below that is "Removable Storage", which displays removable devices that are attached to the computer such as CDs, DVDs, or flash sticks.

You probably don't have any network folders to worry about, and most of the stuff in the red folder is system information. We're mostly interested in the blue folder labeled "Home". Click on it, and it'll open your user home directory with the Dolphin file manager:

Take a quick look around Dolphin. Notice in particular the "Places" panel to the left, which allows you to access the contents of your home directory, the root directory, network folders, and any external devices that happen to be connected to your computer. Right above the whitespace that displays your directory contents is the location bar, which displays the path to wherever you happen to be in your home folder. This particular type of location bar is called a breadcrumbs style location bar.

Your user home directory (or folder; I'll be using the terms "folder" and "directory" interchangeably here) is the equivalent of the Windows "My Documents" folder. But in a Windows environment the system creates some sub-directories for you, so you'll have folders inside of My Documents with names like Music, Pictures, Video, and so on. A lot of modern Linux distros do this as well, but Chakra wisely doesn't presume to know what you want. The only object that's in your home directory by default is the standard KDE "Desktop" folder (which is the most useless folder on earth, but if you try to delete it right now it'll just come back; I'll show you how to get rid of it permanently in a future lesson). It's up to you how you want to organize your files. You can add new folders just like you do in Windows; by right-clicking in the whitespace, selecting "New" and "Folder":

Good file management practices are beyond the scope of this lesson, but in general it's best to keep your files organized neatly into folders, to keep folder names (and, if possible, file names) down to a single word with no spaces, and to avoid using capital letters. Try it that way; you'll thank me later. When you save something, whether it's something you downloaded or a document you've created, make sure you save it to the right location so you can find it later. The standard KDE "Save" dialog looks like this:

Take a look over to the left of the window; there you'll see the same "Places" panel that's on the far left side of the Dolphin file manager... handy if you need to save something to an external device, a network folder, or a different part of the filesystem. Notice in the screenshot that the blue Home folder is highlighted. Then if you look above the whitespace you'll see "> Home"; this tells you that you're looking at the contents of your user home directory, which at the moment only contains the "Desktop" folder. If you click on the "Desktop" folder it'll read "> Home > Desktop"; this tells you that you're in the "Desktop" directory, which resides within your user home directory.

Now close or minimize Dolphin so you're looking at your desktop. In the upper left part of the screen is the "Folder View" widget:

Widgets are handy little devices that can be added to the KDE desktop to enhance it's functionality, and the "Folder View" widget is sort of like a mini file manager. You can set it to display the contents of whatever directory you want; right now it's set to display the contents of the "Desktop" directory. By default the desktop directory displays a link to your home directory (which the desktop directory is actually inside of; I told you it was a dumb folder), and the trash can. Any folders displayed here will open in Dolphin, so if you want to get into your home directory without using the Kickoff menu you can click on the blue "Home" folder in the "Folder View" directory.

By the way, have you noticed the little configuration handle that pops up every time you run your mouse over the Folder View widget?

You can get rid of that by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop or on the cashew-shaped thingy to the far right of the task panel and selecting "Lock Widgets". Any time you want to add or remove widgets, move them around, or monkey with the panel(s) you just right-click anywhere on the desktop or the panel and select "Unlock Widgets" from the context menu. We'll talk more about widgets in a future lesson.

The Activities Manager Icon

Immediately to the right of the Kickoff menu launcher is this funny-looking icon:

This launched the Activity Manager. Activities, along with virtual desktops, are an organizational tool that allows you to run multiple desktops simultaneously for different tasks. I'll discuss these in detail when I discuss desktop configuration.

The System Tray

On the task panel and to the right is the system tray, which displays stuff that's running in the background:

The icon to the extreme left of the tray is the Knotify notification tool. It'll display the progress of things like file transfers and downloads, and you'll get popups from it when processes complete or things happen on your system. To the right of that is the Apper upgrade notifier. Apper is a graphical tool for software management, and the icon in the tray lets you know if any upgrades are available. To the right of that is a pair of scissors; this is the Klipper clipboard utility. The speaker is for the Kmix audio mixer; click on that to adjust volume levels, and from there click "Mixer" to configure your channels (hint: once we get your audio codecs installed, if you don't have sound go into the mixer and make sure the "PCM" channel is turned up). Then there's the icon for KNetworkManager; click to configure your network devices. In most cases it'll auto-detect your stuff and you won't have to do anything, but you might have to do some configuring for wifi devices, especially if you're connecting to an encrypted network. The little upward-pointing arrow to the far right will display any background processes that aren't displayed in the tray, or if you left-click on it you'll get the system tray settings dialog.

The Device Notifier

When you insert a removable device, say, a flash stick or CD, the Device Notifier icon will appear in the system tray:

Once your device has loaded you'll get a popup from the notifier, which will go away after a few seconds. You can bring it back and view your devices by clicking on the icon; here's what the display looks like:

When you first insert a device it isn't mounted; that means that the system is aware of it but no programs can access it. If you click on the device it'll give you a list of options, mostly apps you can open it with; for instance here's mine with a video DVD inserted:

Select one of those options, and the system will mount the device and open it in the app you chose. If you want to mount the device without actually opening it you click the little plug symbol. Then you can access it at your leisure. After it's mounted the plug will turn into a little eject button, which you'll click to unmount something (you frequently have to do this to pull a video DVD). Now, you're probably wondering why you can't just insert a device and have it pop right open in an appropriate app like you can in Windows, and the answer is simple: auto-mount and open is a huge security risk. You can configure the notifier to auto-mount media when it's inserted (although I advise against it), but not to auto-open.

Running Upgrades

There's a good chance when you boot into Chakra for the first time that there are upgrades for your installed software. They might be security patches for the core system, or newer versions of the apps and/or the desktop environment. The way to keep your system up to date is by running sudo pacman -Syu

Installing software requires root user privileges. I'll talk more about the root account in a few minutes; for now just enter the password you chose during the installation (please tell me you remember it!) when prompted. If the password is correct you'll get a progress screen that'll tell you how your updates are going. It'll probably take awhile; don't forget it's downloading this stuff from online repositories.

One thing Chakra definitely does NOT feature is automatic upgrades. This is a good thing; I wouldn't dream of running upgrades without first looking over the list. Not that I think the upgrades are going to break anything, but it's good to know what's going on. Always read the output that shows up in the terminal window after your upgrades are done; there might be something you have to do after the upgrades are complete. If I'm upgrading to a new version of an app that I have running at the moment, I'll usually close that app. Also, don't forget that the Chakra repositories get new versions of your apps shortly after they're released, so (for example) it may be kinda stupid to run upgrades if you have a big presentation tomorrow and there's a new version of Kpresenter in your upgrade list; the app might have had some stuff moved around or some completely new features, and who wants to contend with an unfamiliar new version when people are watching?

The Root Account

The root user account is kinda like the administrator account on a Windows system, except that it's mandatory in Linux... which is one of several reasons why Linux is more secure than Windows. Chakra is a Linux distro mostly intended for home desktop use, and on most home computers the user is also the administrator, so the default setup on a Chakra installation is for the first regular user account (the one created at installation time) to have the same password as the root account. I think this is fine for a home desktop machine, but just be aware that the root account and your regular user account are separate, even though the passwords are the same.

It may seem like an inconvenience at first to have to provide a password every time you want to perform any kind of system administration task, but in fact it can really save your bacon. Let's say you open an e-mail that contains malware or some other funky stuff (and don't let anyone tell you that there isn't malware out there that targets Linux; there is). That malware probably won't be able to screw up your system, because you opened the e-mail as a regular user, the e-mail and all it contains has your regular user's permissions attached to it, and your regular user doesn't have the permissions to mess with anything that might bring the system down. That's just one example of how the Unix privilege separation makes your computer more secure. This is why even systems administrators on big enterprise systems will have a regular user account that they do most of their work from, only logging in as root when it's necessary to do so.

Getting Out

No matter how much you love your new Chakra Linux system, you've gotta get out sometime. You'll almost never have to reboot a Linux system unless you upgrade the kernel (I've had servers that have logged over a year of uninterrupted up-time), but lots of people shut down when they're not using their desktop computers in order to save on the electricity bill, and of course if you're using a laptop you'll probably be shutting it down to go from place to place. If there's more than one user you might be logging out so the other person can use it, which may sound weird coming from Windows but Linux is so amazingly configurable that everyone is probably going to want their own desktop setup! Of course if you're using Linux in an enterprise environment you'll probably want to log out when you're away from your machine for security reasons. You can exit your session from the Kickoff menu. If you hover over "Leave" you'll get a bunch of options for shutting down, restarting, and logging out:

Another way you can do it is to minimize your windows and right-click on the desktop. Select "Leave", and you'll get a dialog box with options to log out, restart, shut down, or cancel. If you do nothing it'll log you out in thirty seconds.

The Bare Necessities

This has been just a quick brush-over of some of the basic features and functionality of the KDE 4.8 desktop environment on Chakra Linux. We've barely scratched the surface, but hopefully you'll be able to find your way around your desktop now. Now you're probably going to want to get some softwareinstalled so you can really use your new Chakra Linux system; click here to learn about Chakra's software management tools.

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