This is Alan Pope with the eighth screencast in the
Ubuntu Month of Screencasts.
All of the screencasts in this month can be downloaded for free
at our website which is screencasts.ubuntu.com.
In this screencast we are going to look at the contents of the Places and System menus
Not everything, but most of the things in those menus.
The places menu, you can see, consists of a bunch of bookmarks, at the top.
First of all there is a link to your Home directory
and here you can see all of the files that are in your home directory.
and you can add to those bookmarks that appear on the left hand side
and under the Places menu up here.
You can modify that list, you can do that quite easily
by just dragging a folder into the bookmark list.
and straight away you've now got a new bookmark
and when you double-click that bookmark it takes you to that folder
You can see under the Places menu it's now created a bookmarks folder
because we've got more than a certain number of bookmarks
it's created a kind of sub folder.
And if we navigate to one of those sub folders
we get taken straight to the window.
Going back to our home folder, we can also manage
our bookmarks from the bookmarks menu.
We can here there's my bookmark listed at the bottom.
We can remove them from there as well.
Also under the Places menu
there is a link that just says Computer
and from here we can see Filesystem.
Which is the top level of the hierarchy of files and folders on the disk
and this is the top level here many files and folders
that we general don't touch and don't use.
In fact we don't have rights to touch and use
other than the home directory.
There's also access to removable devices, like CD-ROMs
and memory sticks and other mountable devices.
Beneath that there is a CD/DVD Creator,
this is a simple CD burning application.
You can go to somewhere on your file system,
grab some files and just drag them into that window.
And then you get the option to write those files to disk.
So you just put a blank CD or DVD in, hit Write to Disk
and it will write at whatever speed you specify in the pop-up dialog.
Also under the Places menu is the Network option.
Now within this we can navigate to other hosts on the network.
Specifically we might use this for browsing shares on a Windows network.
I don't have any Windows machines on my network, so I can't actually show you that right now.
But if you look at one of our other screencasts on Samba file sharing,
you will see how that is used.
We can also connect to servers,
specifying a Server name
and Share name
and other credentials, such as your username and so on.
Now we can connect to Windows shares, SSH servers,
FTP servers and various other protocols can be used.
And this is useful for creating a shortcut on the desktop
or on the Places menu to connect to a remote server.
We can also use the search option under the Places menu, to search for files.
So for example if I just type bots,
it finds a whole load of music that I've downloaded.
If I type lugradio, it finds some podcasts.
And these are all files that it's found within my Home directory.
There are various options, which you can join together
So I could say, find only files that are of a certain size
and were created within a certain period and so on and so on.
So you can join together criteria to find your files.
And finally on the Places menu there's a recently used list.
So here I can just click on something from the recently used list, in this case it's a video
and it open up the video player, Totem and plays the video.
So it keeps a list of the recently accessed files,
which you can clear out by using clear recent documents
So if this is a shared user ID,
then I might want to do that, to clear out that list.
Or if you just like being tidy, you can clear it out.
You can see the option is grayed out,
once you've cleared that list out.
So that's a brief run down of the Places menu.
On the System menu we've got access to the on-line help.
I say on-line, it's inside the distribution, it's part of the distribution,
so it doesn't have to connect to the Internet for that.
We also have the Preferences and Administration menu.
Let's have a look at Preferences for now.
First item on the Preferences is to do with the assistive technology
So this is where we can set accessibility options
for perhaps people who have difficulty using a keyboard
or maybe have poor eyesight.
And there are numerous options in here for specifying
which applications we're going to use to assist us
and also settings for keyboard accessibility
like sticky keys and other useful options.
Now there is also an option here for accessible login
and it mentions this GDM Setup
we'll come back to this GDM Setup later,
but GDM Setup configures the logon screen.
GDM is one of the programs that provides the logon screen
and GDM Setup is this one
And you can see there are further accessibility options here
to make the logon screen accessible.
Also under preferences there's Keyboard Accessibility,
which takes us directly to a dialog we have just seen.
So here we can enable the keyboard accessibility features, at the top
and that allows us to switch on Sticky Keys
So for example it will enable us to toggle
certain keys to hold them down, without actually having to physically hold them down,
which is difficult for people with certain disabilities
Also under the Preferences is the About Me screen.
In here you can change your password,
fill in some details about yourself,
which could be used by other applications
and also select an image, an avatar or a face.
I'll just pick this fish.
Now this image will appear when your screen is locked
If you move the mouse while the screensaver's kicked in
you'll get a dialog asking for your password
and that's where you'll see that image and a few other places as well.
And there's plenty of other fields for you to fill in as well.
Another option is Appearances, under the Preferences menu
and this is setting your own appearance for
just the user account you're currently logged in to.
So each person can have their own preferences, their own settings.
And here there is a theme, which controls the look and feel
of the titles and all of the other elements on the screen.
and there's some high contrast and large font versions there.
And if I just choose one of these themes
you'll see that pretty much instantly, things start to change.
The window title changes the icons change
all manner of elements on the screen change
and if a choose a different one, it all changes back again.
You can install additional themes and customize the themes.
You can also change the background color,
So you can make it a solid color or a gradient.
or if you've got a picture, you can add it in with the Add button.
Or you could just choose one of the already supplied images, like this.
You could choose which fonts are used throughout the Ubuntu Applications.
And you could choose the size in dots per inch
the default here is 75 dots per inch and if I change that to 95,
you'll see that the fonts jump to a much larger,
possibly more readable size.
There's also more options in here for LCD panels
for optimizing the output on an LCD panel.
Also at the top is Interface
and under the Interface tab of the Appearance preferences dialog
you can see, we can change some of the options for the way menus are presented.
So for example, if I switch off icons in the menus,
then the Applications menu here at the top of the screen loses all the icons.
And this may make the menu appear quicker.
Which is useful on a low spec machine.
Also down here we can change the appearance of the toolbar within applications.
So I've got the text editor open behind here
and as I change these options, you can see the menu changes within the text editor.
Finally, there is a desktop effects option.
This enables some of the funky 3D and other enhanced features of the desktop.
We will talk about that in another screencast.
Also under Preferences, there is an option to set your default printer.
So if there are numerous printers available to you, configured on this machine
You can set whichever your default printer is.
And you set up your printers in the Administration menu.
We have talked in a previous screencast about how to setup printers.
and we'll talk more about that in a subsequent screencast
Another option down her is Preferred Applications.
This is useful if you have a preference for an application,
which is not one of the default ones supplied by Ubuntu.
So for example if you want a different browser or a different email client
or different media player,
you can choose them in here, so that they open by default,
instead of the applications that Ubuntu deliver.
We also have configurable keyboard shortcuts
many keyboards these days have a lot of extra buttons on them
and you can configure some of those extra buttons to do things like
turn the volume up and down, play media, eject a CD and so on.
There are also some standard keys on a keyboard,
which we might want to configure various actions
for example we've got here show the run dialog
and show the panel menu are Alt + F2 and Alt + F1.
If I hit Alt + F1 now, the Application menu appears
So that's configurable, I have it configured to Alt + F1
In addition, if I press the Print Screen button
it takes a screenshot of the desktop.
And if I choose Alt + Print, it takes a screenshot of the window.
So I'll get a screenshot of just this window we're looking at now.
There we go.
So it's just that window.
And you can configure these just by clicking on them.
We also have an option here for removable drives and media
and this tells Ubuntu what to do when it discovers removable media.
So what happens when you insert a removable CD,
what happens when you insert a USB key
or an MP3 player, sorry media player,
into your Ubuntu system
There is also what to do when you insert blank CDs and DVDs
and there's a couple of options here, there's Serpentine that you will find over here,
it's the audio CD creator so you can drag music into Serpentine
and burn that to a disk.
And the other option is to use this CD burner I mentioned earlier
where you can drag other files in here, data
or make a data CD or DVD.
Here we have what to do when someone inserts an Audio CD
and that will run Sound Juicer.
Which enables you to play and extract the audio from a CD.
For video it uses Totem, which is the Movie Player.
And for portable music devices it uses Rhythmbox.
So that's so you can synchronize your audio to your portable music player.
If you've got a digital camera, there's a manager that pops up
and asks if you want to import your photos.
And if you have a PDA, you can synchronize with Palm and Pocket PC devices.
There's a nice little panel applet which you'll find
if you right-click the panel and choose Add... and scroll down the bottom,
you can see the Pilot Applet is for synchronizing to PDAs,
Palm compatible PDAs.
We can also automatically install printers when they are plugged in.
So if you have a USB printer and you plug it in, if you tick this box
then it's the equivalent of you going through this menu, System | Administration | Printing
to actually install and configure the printer.
And similarly when a scanner is connected
you can run SANE, which you usually find under the Graphics menu.
And SANE is the scanner interface,
allows you to do test scans and scan images from a scanner
And there's some other options for what to do when you
plug in some other input devices.
We also have a Power Management section under the Preferences menu
and this really makes more sense if you've got a battery operated machine.
There's more options for tuning if it's a laptop for example
We can set here what to do when the power button is pressed.
So when you press the power button it's the equivalent of pressing this icon on the toolbar here.
This dialog box comes up,
So where it says 'When the power button is pressed, Ask me',
it means this dialog will appear.
Also, if your PC has a Suspend button you can choose what to do.
Suspend means save the computer state to memory.
Hibernate means save the computer state to disk.
Saving to disk means you can unplug the power
Suspend requires some power, but for a laptop it will obviously have a battery.
There is also this icon on the toolbar you can choose to display
It doesn't really make any sense with this PC because it's a desktop
and not a laptop, so there's not much point in me displaying that
because it will always be plugged in when it's switched on.
We can also configure network proxy, this is useful if you're on a corporate network
or even a home network the has a proxy server.
You can configure there the address of your proxy server,
useful if you have to use that to get out on to the web.
We can also configure the screen resolution
So there's a little drop down list here with screen resolution
and the refresh rate which is important for Cathode Ray Tube monitors.
And there's also a Rotation option, which is useful if you've got a monitor that can be rotated.
Or if maybe you've got a tablet PC, which can be rotated as well.
And then you can choose to make this the default resolution for everyone on this PC
We'll talk more about screen resolution on a later screencast
There's a load of screensavers supplied with Ubuntu.
As you can see, quite a few and I'll just pick one randomly.
You can see, you get a preview in that window.
If you get press the preview button below, you get a full screen preview.
You can pick and choose any screensaver you like
And will use that as your screensaver, whichever one you choose.
As you can see there is an awful lot of them.
And right at the top of the list you can also just choose random,
and it will pick a screensaver randomly
each time the screensaver kicks in you'll get a random screensaver.
You can change the interval after which the screensaver kicks in.
and you can also choose to lock the screen, so it asks you for your password
when the screensaver kicks in
and someone moves the mouse or touches the keyboard
you can force it to ask you for a password.
There's also a power management option that takes us to where we've just seen.
Let's have a look at the windows preferences.
Now this is an option that I personally quite like.
But I know some people don't like it, it's not familiar.
Let's open a couple of windows and see what this does.
If I just open the calculator and the dictionary
Now if I move these around a little bit,
With that first option ticked in the window preferences.
What'll happen is as I move the mouse over a window, it highlights the window.
it makes it the active window, I don't have to click on the window at all.
All I am doing is moving the mouse over the window, I'm not clicking it at all.
So all I'm doing is moving the mouse and it becomes highlighted.
In addition there is a 'Raise selected window after a given interval' option.
And if we turn that on, let me just rearrange these windows so they're on top of each other.
If you turn this on then after a half second delay
it will bring the window to the front without clicking on the window
So it's quite useful to just nudge the mouse over a window
without having to actually physically press the mouse button.
Some people prefer it, I prefer to just have it
activate the window and not actually bring it to the front.
You can also choose what to do when someone double-clicks the title bar.
So by default it's maximize, but you can also make it roll up,
so all you see is the title bar.
This window can't be maximized, so it won't work for this window.
There is also an option for the movement key, if you grab the Alt key
in this particular case and grab hold of the window,
you can move any window around using that combination of
Alt key and click the mouse.
We also have the option of setting keyboard repeat delay.
So for example the speed at which those letter Os appear there,
is configured by the options at the top of that window.
We can also set the keyboard layout.
So the default here is U.S. English, which is wrong for my keyboard.
So we can change that just by clicking Add
and choose the more appropriate layout.
I've got a UK keyboard, so if I scroll down and find United Kingdom.
There are a number of variants, but I am just going to just the default variant
because I don't have a Dvorak keyboard or any other wacky layout.
I'll set that to be the default and then remove the other layout.
because I don't need that. And now I've set my keyboard layout.
There's a little bug in this part of the window,
which I'm sure will disappear before this is released.
And these are some options for customizing your keyboard layout.
For example some people don't like the Caps Lock key at all.
They think it's redundant and so here you can configure the Caps Lock key
to do something other than be Caps Lock.
Which is quite a useful feature.
And the final tab is the Typing Break tab.
Where if you switch this on, you can enforce Ubuntu to coerce you to take a break.
and you get this little timer appear in the panel at the top of the screen
and you can configure the limit, so you can try and get it to give you a break every
however many minutes you choose, every six minutes would be nice,
but generally you would set to something a bit more appropriate
like maybe an hour or less, or more it's entirely up to you.
And then it will lock the screen
you can skip the typing break if you're in the middle of something
you can skip it, but it's quite a nice feature to enable you to force-ably take a break
and it counts down and you see that color bar fill up as the time passes.
The final one we will take a look at is the remote desktop
Remote desktop is very useful for someone else to provide support to you.
If they want to or if you would like them to remotely control your desktop.
You can set it here to force them to use a password in order to remotely control your desktop.
And the is a remote control program under the Applications menu, in Internet,
you'll find there is a remote client so you can remotely control other PCs as well.
Let's take a look at some of the options under the Administration menu.
Now these options are making changes to the whole system.
So it asks you for your password to make sure you are allowed
to make changes to the system.
So I'll type in my password.
And the option I chose was Software Sources
and this is where Ubuntu gets it's software updates from.
You can get your software updates on a CD-ROM or you can get
your software updates more commonly over the Internet.
And this is closely linked to the Update Manager,
which is also in the Administration menu.
And here the Update Manager is checking those sources
that are listed in the Software Sources application, to find out what updates there are.
And there are a number of sets of updates that you can apply.
And here we don't have any updates that are required.
We'll talk more about updating the system,
we'll have a whole screencast about that later.
Another useful tool is the System Log.
System Log is useful when trying to diagnose problems with your system.
There are a number of these
somewhat difficult to understand log files.
But usually a developer or an expert can what the messages mean.
And so sometimes someone might ask you to copy and paste chunks out of a particular log file.
And here's how you get to the main log files for your system
and you can copy and paste those into a email or a support forum, for example.
So it's called System Log, but there are numerous log files in there.
But they are system wide log files.
There's also some configuration options for the network
Now you'll notice with each of these, it's not asking me for a password again.
It asked me for the very first application I opened for a password,
but the subsequent ones it didn't because I've typed my password in within a certain few minutes.
Here we can configure the network, so I have a wired connection to my network.
and I can configure that to automatically connect and get an IP address from my network,
We'll talk more about networking in a subsequent screencast
That's a bit too much for this one.
Here we can set my hostname, which is the name my computer is known as on the network.
And once we've configured our network, there are some network tools,
that we can use to diagnose network problems.
Common tools that we might use are Ping, Traceroute and lookup
for example to validate that the physical network works
and we're able to send packets over the network.
and we're able to lookup hostnames and all these other kind of 'networky' type things.
Again they are useful in a support point of view, if someone wants you to try something out
you can do so through that application.
We also have the GDM setup that I mentioned earlier,
this is the log in window configuration.
So the log in window is usually the first screen you see when you boot up your Ubuntu system.
It asks you for your username and password and you can change the theme
There's a number of themes installed and you can add additional themes
they're downloadable from the Internet.
And you can see there are a few themes delivered.
And you can choose to have a random one from that set.
So you see the little tick marks here, you tick all the ones that you want to be used when you log on
or you can just choose one.
There's also some security options
We have to be careful with these because this one for example enables automatic log in,
which means it's very useful in that it won't ask you for a password,
as soon as you boot up it will log straight in as that user.
Or alternatively, this is what I use on my daughter's PC, I have a timed log in,
so if she doesn't do anything for thirty seconds, it will just log her on to the desktop.
But if I want to log on, I can quite easily, so long as I do so before that thirty seconds is up.
Loads of further options on that page, which we're not going to go into
Also it's possible to remotely log on to your Ubuntu system
and remotely log on to other Ubuntu systems, in fact and this allows us to configure
what the log on screen looks like when we're logging on remotely
Whether it's the same as the log on screen locally or different.
We can have a different look and feel for remote users than local users for example.
And the users that are listed in what's called the face browser.
So some of these themes have a thing called a face browser,
which is basically a list of users who could log on
and it shows a little icon and their name.
You can populate this list, which actually gets populated from the system
list of users, which is this file that it mentions, /etc/passwd is a list of users.
And if you look in the About Me, you can see that little icon appears in the face browser.
So each person gets their own little icon and they can just click on that
to log on and type in their password.
We also have a neat System Monitor here.
This is useful for figuring out if there's any processes,
programs that are consuming too much of your CPU
We can also see how much free disk space we have here.
So I have a very small disk here.
It's quite a useful system monitor.
Okay, that's a review of some of the applications in the Preferences and Administration menu
All the screencasts are available to download from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com