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 -- and if you don't, you can "turn down" the system requirements to suit your hardware's capabilities. 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.

Useful programs for the former Windows™ user

There are usually Linux equivalents to the programs you are used to. Of course, anything which requires Windows will not work (easily) on Linux. Some of the equivalents behave (noticeably) differently than their Windows counterparts; some of them have many more features (or fewer). But it is rare that Windows is required to get your work done. The following is a list of common categories of programs, and what you would use on Linux (in parentheses are other common choices, all are free of cost):

• Web browsing: Firefox (Google Chrome, Konqueror) -- equivalent of Internet Explorer
• Word processing: OpenOffice Writer (KWrite, Abiword) -- equiv. of Word
• Spreadsheet: OpenOffice Calc (KSpread, Gnumeric) -- equiv. of Excel
• Presentation: OpenOffice Present (KPresenter, agnubis) -- equiv. of PowerPoint
• Database: MySQL (PostgreSQL) -- equiv. of MS SQL Server
• Mail client: Thunderbird (KMail, Evolution) -- equiv. of Outlook
• Graphics editing: GIMP (and many others) -- equiv. of Photoshop

This is just to whet your whistle... there are thousands of free, powerful and mostly high-quality programs available on Linux.

Next time: so what doesn't work so well, and what can I do about it?

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