UNIX For Dummies [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Browsing with Pictures: Mozilla and Konqueror

The most common browsers for UNIX are currently Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera. Mozilla is the open source core of Netscape (which is itself available on some UNIX flavors, but works almost exactly like Mozilla). Konqueror is the browser that comes with KDE. Mozilla and KDE are open source and available for free. Opera is from Opera Software in Norway, and shows ads, which go away if you buy an expensive license.
Because UNIX versions of Mozilla, Netscape, and Opera are nearly identical to their equivalents on other systems (you know which ones we mean), if you’re already a Mozilla or Opera user, there’s little reason to switch. We don’t cover Opera in detail here, but it’s a perfectly good browser, and if you can use any other graphical browser, it takes about two minutes for you to figure out Opera.

(Don’t bother) configuring Mozilla or Konqueror

Because Mozilla is an X application, it uses dozens and dozens of X resources you can customize. Here’s our advice: Forget it. The standard configuration works fine, and our sad experience is that most changes you can make only make Mozilla worse. Konqueror is even worse, being both an X and a KDE application, but the same advice applies.

Starting them up

You start your browser by typing mozilla or konqueror in your shell. (More likely you have a Mozilla or Konqueror entry on your screen’s toolbar, so just click it.)

A home page is a page on the World Wide Web that serves as a starting point for information about something. If, for example, you want information about our For Dummies books, you may want to start at the Internet Gurus Central home page, which is at http://net.gurus.com .

Home pages generally contain introductory information about the entity whose home page it is, along with lots of links to other pages. Many home pages for organizations have URLs such as www. something, where something is the Internet domain name for the organization. Guess whose home page is www.microsoft.com ?

The browser starts up with whatever home page it’s been set up with. You see a window like the one shown in Figure 18-1 (Konqueror) or Figure 18-2 (Mozilla). Konqueror is also a file browser, so rather than a Web page, you may see a page full of icons for the files in your home directory.

Figure 18-1: Fine literature in Konqueror.

Figure 18-2: Fine literature in Mozilla.

Text-only means that you don’t get to see any of the cool pictures, animations, and sounds that make the Web the phenomenally popular success that it is. On the other hand, Lynx is blindingly fast (drawing those pictures is slow) and quite adequate for a quick look at sites where you don’t care about the pictures.

Lynx is entirely controlled from the keyboard, so you navigate around the screen with the up and down arrows, follow links with the right arrow, and select and change fields with Enter. After you do this for a few minutes, it’s surprisingly usable, and Lynx is very good about keeping a help line at the bottom telling you where you are and what characters you might want to type now. The most important one is q for quit.