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Introduction for New Users, part 2
Contents
Cambridge University Engineering Department
Teaching Workstations
Tim Love (June 2010)
This document describes some more advanced facilities available on the
Terminals in the DPO. It should only be read having reading the
First time user guide
If you click on the 
at the bottom-left of the
screen, you're in the
Applications Browser, where there are programs to handle many tasks
- Writing Web Pages - Try OpenOffice.org Writer/Web in the Internet section. To find out where to install pages, look at our How to create unofficial pages page.
- Image Editing - Try The Gimp in the Graphics section
- Photo Management - Try F-Spot in the Graphics section
- Creating diagrams and charts - The Office section has many programs.
- Taking Screen dumps - Try Take Screenshot in the System section
- Reading usenet newsgroups - KNode in the Internet section is a dedicated newsreader.
- Text editing - Emacs and gedit in the Utilities section are both designed for editing source code.
- Slides - OpenOffice.org Impress reads PowerPoint files.
For some experiments you will need to use the Terminal Window. Some useful
commands are
pwd - To Print the Working Directory; i.e. the folder you're "in".cd directory-name - Change Directory. Note that cd by itself goes to your home directory, and cd .. goes up the directory tree. ls - LiSt the files in the current directory. Use ls -l to get more information about the filescp old-file new-file - CoPy a file.more textfilename - shows you the contents of the text file.wc textfilename - shows you a WordCount of the text file as well as how many characters and lines it has.man command - shows you the command's MANual page. For example, typing man ls tells you all about the ls command.
Note that you can drop icons into the Terminal Window - the name of the file or folder you drop is pasted on the command line.
The 
option (it's in the Other section of
the applications panel) gives access to many customisation options. Some
let you customise the desktop effects, while others let you control
various options that may help if your eyes and fingers aren't very fast -
try the
option. The 
program might be of use too - it tries to
read out text, etc.
The desktop can easily be customised too. Two useful features are
- New Launchers on the desktop - to add a new icon to the desktop, click with the
right mouse-button on the background to get a menu, and choose the
Create Launcher ... option. You'll be able to choose the
icon and what it does when clicked on. You can remove Launchers by
putting them in the wastebasket.
- New Items in the Taskbar - if you click on an empty part
of the strip at the bottom of the screen with the right mouse-button,
you'll get an Add to Panel menu. This lets you add items such as
Menu Bar - a customisable menu.
- The Connect to Server option available from various places
probably won't be useful to you. See our Linux Servers page instead.
- Though some menus invite you to upgrade or install software, you're
unlikely to be able to.
- For more surprizes, see our bugs/features page
