UNIX For Dummies [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

You Mean the Little Guys with the Hats?

Another desktop environment you might see is GNOME. It’s supposed to be pronounced with a hard “g” — “guh-NOME.” GNOME is started by running a program called gnome-session . GNOME comes with a large variety of themes and styles. In fact, you can configure GNOME to look enough like KDE to really annoy people who are expecting it to behave exactly the same, too.

GNOME is yet another complete desktop environment — icons, little pointy-clicky things, menus, the whole nine yards. If your system comes with GNOME, but not with CDE, that’s fine. GNOME does all the same kinds of things. It’s just a matter of personal preference, or what happens to be installed.

In Figure 4-13, you see a reasonably typical GNOME desktop. The bar at the bottom of the screen holds buttons for common activities, some of which bring up menus. The button that looks like a little computer monitor with a >_ in it opens a terminal window, which is handy if you want to take a break from the stressful world of mice and graphics and just type a little. Click the foot icon at the lower-left to open the main menu. This menu is where you find a lot of cool toys, such as the GNOME Control Center.

Figure 4-13: A sample GNOME desktop.

Themes

Depending on your configuration, GNOME can look confusingly similar to certain other desktop environments. It won’t be the same, but it may be comforting, or it may be confusing. You can customize it a great deal. How? Start the GNOME Control Center application, and double-click the Theme icon. Play around. The most fun is to be had playing around with the Details button, which lets you mix and match parts of different themes. You can also, of course, come up with something totally unlike any other environment, and that may be the most fun you can have.
If you’re from a Mac environment, and you miss the menu bar at the top of the screen, you can have it back, sort of. If you right-click the bar at the bottom of the screen, click the New Panel item on the pop-up menu and choose the Menu Panel item. It’s not the same as the Mac’s menu bar — for instance, programs won’t put their menus up there, which makes it sort of silly. But it looks a bit similar, and you can put common menus up there. At least it has rounded corners!

GNOME applications

Like KDE, GNOME provides a handful of applications that share its look and feel settings. The names aren’t as standardized as the KDE ones — you can’t just tack a K on the front of a word and expect it to do something — but it sounds cooler that way. Table 4-2 lists some of the more common GNOME applications.

GNOME, like KDE, comes with a broad selection of games to play. Tired of Solitaire? There are a dozen more games where that came from. The exact set of games installed varies from one system to another, but you can count on finding something more fun than working.

Evolution

Okay, we lied. Calling Evolution an e-mail client is like calling an aircraft carrier a biggish boat. Evolution does everything: contact management, scheduling, synchronizing with a Palm Pilot, you name it. But it also does e-mail. It’s a lot like Outlook Express, only it won’t send e-mail to your entire address book saying you love them. See Chapter 17 for details about the e-mail parts of Evolution.

Getting around

GNOME offers multiple workspaces, which are all the rage in UNIX window managers, and has the same basic approach to interfaces that KDE does. Right-clicking is almost always a good bet if you want options. For instance, if you want to move a window from one workspace to another, just right-click the title bar, and select one of the Move options.

If you’re looking for help, try pressing F1 whenever you’re lost or confused. Most of the time, GNOME brings up some online help for you.
A few buttons are generally on the panel at the bottom of the screen, next to the GNOME menu. If you right-click any of the buttons, you can remove or change it. If you right-click an empty part of the bar, you can add a new button, or one of the mini-apps designed to run there, such as a clock. Right-click the bar, select the Add to Panel option from the pop-up menu, and look at all the options you get. Note that it matters where you click. A new item is placed near where you clicked; it won’t be shoved over by the other items on the panel.

Sooner or later, you’ll want to quit. When that time comes, just select the Log Out option from the main GNOME menu. Now you can mutter “I can quit any time I want” under your breath, and make people nervous.