Making it work for you

Part III: Making it work for you

Congratulations! You've installed Ubuntu or Kubuntu on your system.

You will notice if you are using "Ubuntu", that there are menus at the top of the screen, similar to what Mac users are used to. "Kubuntu" users will notice a menu bar on the bottom of the screen, with a "K" icon on the left side -- this is just like the "Start" menu in Windows.

Play around with the menus, get familiar with them. You can't mess up your machine just by playing around, because any time you are about to do something "serious", you will be asked for your password (you did create one, I hope?). This helps ensure that doing serious things to your machine is not so easy, and it also prevents malicious users from just "doing things" to your machine. It does, that is, if you actually assigned a good password (not 'password' or something equally bad).

Open up the "System settings" application: on Kubuntu, it's on the "System" menu (Start, then System, then "System settings"). On Ubuntu you select "System", "Preferences" and then each particular setting you want to modify. Play around a bit with your window settings -- note that you can make either Ubuntu or Kubuntu look and behave pretty much any way you please. If you have a fancy video card with 3D acceleration then you can get some really interesting effects -- but since I don't have such a system, I can't help you there. Kubuntu's KDE environment is a bit more complex to set up, though Ubuntu's GNOME environment may be a bit too simple -- it's just a matter of style and what you are comfortable with.

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