For many of you this walk around might be pointless. But for those of you who need a basic introduction to a different desktop environment, this could be your first step in migrating to the Linux desktop. Read on!

What is GNOME?

Figure 1

First off, GNOME is a desktop environment. What this means is that all of the GNOME applications are aware of one another. Everything is integrated. That means you can open your file manager and drag and drop files into, say, Rhythmbox (a music player similar to iTunes).

GNOME has been around for quite some time and you will it to be the default desktop environment for many of the different Linux distributions.

Figure 1 shows the GNOME desktop in action. You will notice it has all of the typical elements of just about any desktop you have used. Let’s take a look at the more important, basic, elements one at a time.

Panel

A panel is a taskbar is a tray is a shelf. In GNOME you have two basic panels. The upper panel (at the top edge of the desktop) holds the Main Menus, Notification Area (aka System Tray),  Application Launchers, Clock, and User menu. The lower panel (at the lower edge of the desktop) holds the Winlist (where applications are minimized), the Pager (the tool that allows you to switch workspaces), and the Recycle Bin.

You can add various types of items to the panels by right-clicking a panel and selecting “Add to panel…”.

Menus

What is different about GNOME, versus WIndows, is that you do not have a single “Start” menu. Instead you have three main menus. These menus are:

• Applications: This is where you can launch all of your applications.
• Places: This is a menu that holds shortcuts for the various important folder locations (such as Home, Pictures, Music, Downloads, etc). When you click on one of these entries Nautilus (the file manager) will open to that particular directory.
• System: This menu is where you configure your system. The System menu has two very important sub-menus: Preferences (where you set all of your user preferences) and Administration (where you can open up tools for administrative purposes – such as Printers).

When you install a new application that new application will add its menu entry to the Applications menu.

Mouse menu

There is another menu that you should know about. If you right-click on the desktop you will see a menu that allows you to create Folders, Launchers, and Documents (you have to create new templates for this – a more advanced feature). From this menu you can also select to Change Desktop Background. This action is exactly what it sounds like.

Windows

I’m not talking Microsoft here. The windows I am speaking of are the actual windows that contain the applications you use. These windows interact in the same manner you have grown accustomed to. In the upper right hand corner (or upper left if you are using Ubuntu >= 10.04) are three buttons that allow you to minimize a window, maximize a window, or close a window. Sound familiar?

Now, if you right click the titlebar (that is the bar that runs across the top of your application window) you will notice a new menu. From this menu you can also send the window to a different workspace, set the window to always be on top, and more.

Run dialog

Let’s say you want to start an application but don’t know where it is in the menu hierarchy. You do, however, know the command to start the application. For this you can use the Run Dialog. Open the run dialog by clicking Alt-F2 together. This will open up a small window where you can enter your command.

GNOME Control Center

This tool is the heart of the GNOME configuration. You can open it up by opening up the Run Dialog and entering gnome-control-center in this window (see Figure 2) you will find every configuration option you can imagine for the GNOME desktop.

NOTE: You may not see every item in your control center that you see in Figure 2. This particular control center is from a Fedora 13 installation that has a number of applications installed.

Final thoughts

Although a very cursory glance at the GNOME desktop, I hope this has helped those of you who feel lost when trying to use the Linux desktop to become more familiar. My ultimate goal, of course, is to get those of you who are unsure to migrate from your current OS to Linux.

YaST started it’s life in 1995 as a C++ written ncurses GUI and was originally written by Thoamas Fehr and Michael Andres. Believe it or not, YaST has retained that ncurses front end (in case you are without a GUI, this comes in handy) and has a gui for both GTK (GNOME) and QT (KDE). Let’s give YaST a look and see just what it has to offer.

Starting YaST

Figure 1

Naturally you can start YaST from either the menu or the command line. From where in the menu will depend upon which desktop environment you are using. If you are using KDE (as shown in Figure 1), you will find YaST in the Computer tab of the “start” menu. If you are using GNOME, look in System > Administration.

You can also start YaST from the command line. Depending upon which version you need to start you would use one of the following commands:

yast –qt

yast –gtk

yast –ncurses

NOTE: The above commands contain two dashes (“-”), not “em dashes”.

You can run the ncurses version even if you have your graphical desktop open and running. Since some of the tools contained within YaST require administrative privileges, you will, upon launching YaST, have to give your administrator password.

The lay of the land

Figure 2

When you fire up YaST what you will see should immediately feel familar (see Figure 2).  As you can see, the left pane contains categories and the right pane contains the entries for each categories. You will also notice that you can simply scroll through every one of the modules (on the right hand side) without having to select a category. You can also search for a module.

Depending upon your setup you will see different modules. For example, I am running OpenSuSE in a virtual machine (using VirtualBox). Because of this I have no video card or monitor to configure. If I were running OpenSuSE without virtualization, YaST would have been able to detect the card/monitor and offer the module for configuration.

As I said, YaST is a one-stop-shop. From within YaST you can also manage your system’s packages. If you click on the Software section in the right pane you will find a number of entries related to the installation and management of software. You will also notice what seems like two tools for installation:

• Add-on Products
• Software Management

These are actually very different tools. Add-on products are products that can be added from a CD/DVD (or, in some cases) on-line source. The software management tool, however, is exactly what you would think it is – Add/Remove Software.

Power at your fingertips

There are also some fairly powerful tools within YaST. If you look at either the Novell AppArmor section, the System section, or the Networking section you will find some tools you might not have ever been able to find in another distribution’s control panel. Some of these are:

• /etc/sysconfig Editor
• Boot loader configuration
• System Backup
• System Restore
• Kerberos client
• LDAP client
• Windows Domain Membership

and much more.

Final thoughts

YaST is one of the most powerful configuration tools in all of Linux-dom. Without installing a tool like Webmin, you will be hard pressed to find any other “control panel” as fully realized as you will with YaST. If you have been looking for a reason to give OpenSuSE a try, let YaST be that reason.

Webmin arrived on the scene in 1997 and pretty much blew away the competition. Webmin is truly a one-stop shop for Linux configuration. It’s modular so you can add and remove modules as they are needed. Webmin can configure your system, servers, networking, hardware, clusters, you name it!

Even though Webmin is a web-based utility, it does not require a server to be installed or running. Webmin contains its own built-in server so you will not need Apache running. Webmin does have to be running in order to log in.

The easiest way to install Webmin is to open up your Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for webmin, and install it. Or you can go to the Webmin Site, download the the appropriate binary and let your package manager do the work for you. If you are wanting to install Webmin on a headless server you can do the following:

• Secure shell to your server
• Download the correct installation file using the wget command.
• Issue the command to install Webmin (such as rpm -ivh webmind-XXX.rpm (where XXX is the release number)

After the installation is complete you may have to start Webmin manually (the rpm installation starts the server for you). To start Webmin you will issue the command:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/webmin start

or

/etc/init.d/webmin start

Once you have started Webmin you log into it with with your browser by pointing it to:

http://IP_OR_DOMAIN:10000

Where IP_OR_DOMAIN is the IP address or the domain Webmin is installed on. If you are using it for local configuration you can point your browser to http://localhost:10000.

Webmin Main Page

As you can see, in the image to the left, the default Webmin page is very easy to navigate.Upon installation one of the first links you should click on this page is the Webmin link in the left navigation. When that menu expands you will see a number of entries, of which one is called Webmin Configuration.

The Webmin Configuration Page

Click on the Webmin Configuration option to reveal a number of possible choices. This section is very important because you will configure access, logging, certificates, categories, and a number of other critical features.

Make sure, however, when you make any changes to Webmin that restart the Webmin server. You can restart Webmin by clicking the Restart Webmin button that is at the bottom of the Webmin Configuration page.

Controlling Webmin

In the same area of the restart button there are a few other important options. If you know you are going to be using Webmin for all of your configuration needs you will want to make sure Webmin starts at boot.

Another important screen to visit, before you jump into various modules, is the Webmin Users screen. In this screen you can define groups and users and their various permissions for the Webmin system. Here you can define what modules a user or group has access to which can be very handy.

Once you get beyond Webmin basic configuration it is time to poke around the various modules. In later articles I will discuss some of the best of the Webmin modules.

Final Thoughts

Webmin is one of the most powerful administration tools available. If you haven’t experienced the power that is Webmin, install it now and see how much power you can have at your fingertips.