[StuCo 98008]
GNU/Linux for Beginners

Session 4

Window Managers

X Applications

By the end of this lecture you will know

A lot of buzzwords

KDE, GNOME, WindowMaker, BlackBox, TWM

OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric

Mozilla, Galeon, Epiphany, Konqueror, Firebird

Grip, MPlayer, K3B, Gcombust

GIMP, Dia, Kivio

That there is no one “Linux” look or configuration.

That choosing your poison can be a daunting task.

Desktop Environments

Control your GUI's look & feel

Menus

Window decorations and handling

Icons

Applets

Dominant Players

KDE

GNOME

WindowMaker

Enlightenment

BlackBox

TWM

KDE

Pros

Absolutely fluffy

Huge user base

Excellent native applications

Cons

Resource hog

CPU (266MHz+)

RAM (128MB+)

Disk space (150MB+)

Too smart for its own good?

GNOME

Pros

Customizable

Faster than KDE

Native apps

Cons

Less intuitive than KDE for M$-Windows users

Disk space (150MB+)

WindowMaker

Pros

Lightweight

Powerful

Cons

Even less intuitive for M$-Windows users

Being superseded by big-2 (KDE/GNOME)

u

BlackBox

Pros

Very small and lightweight

Can even be statically compiled for emergency toolkits.

Cons

Small user base

Too minimalistic?

Tab Window Manager

Pros

Negligible memory footprint

Fast!

Cons

Limited functionality

No fluff

X Applications

Browse the web

Use email

Chat online

Listen to music – watch DVDs/VCDs

Burn CDs

Edit audio, video and still images

Do work!

Web Browsers

Epiphany

Galeon

Email Clients

Editors

KWrite

Graphics/Imaging

Audio/Video

XMMS

GNUsound

Word Processors

Spreadsheets

Networking

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WaveMon

Ethereal

Choice: Bliss or Burden?

New users are overwhelmed by breadth of choice

Fail-safe configuration for newbies

KDE

Mozilla Web Browser & Email Client

OpenOffice.org

Special needs not compromised

Nostalgics: “I'll die with TWM on my screen”

Geeks: “I compiled GNOME from source and it loads in 1,2 seconds”

Old hardware: “Mozilla takes 3 minutes to load with 8MB of RAM on my 100MHz box”

Final Notes

3GB on disk for OS + all of the above

“Registry clutter” not an issue

Installing/uninstalling one application does not affect the other

Installing/uninstalling applications certainly doesn't affect the Operating System (!)

Why do M$-IE and M$-Office start up so fast?

"He who gives up functionality for ease of use loses both and deserves neither." (Anonymous)

For Enlightenment screenshots, visit http://www.enlightenment.org/pages/shots.html

The rest will be covered in this lecture.

http://www.kde.org

http://www.gnome.org/start/2.4/

http://www.windowmaker.org

http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/

http://www.plig.org/xwinman/vtwm.html

.

Mozilla sports advanced features like Bayesian spam filters that can be trained to save your precious time by automatically finding and deleting spam email. It also supports OpenPGP encryption.

KMail is the native KDE email application. It handles encryption/signing of email very intuitively, andintegrates with SpamAssassin to handle spam.

Balsa is the standard GNOME email client.

Everybody loves the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) – an excellent free alternative to proprietary applications like Adobe Photoshop.

Dia is a drawing and diagramming application, that lets you easily create flowcharts, structural diagrams, network representations etc. It's similar in functionality to M$-Visio.

The same goes for Kivio, a Dia alternative integrated with KDE, but less mature than Dia.

MPlayer is arguably one of the best all-round multimedia applications. It will play virtually any audio/video file you throw at it (mp3, ogg, wav, au, avi, mpg, wma, mov, DVD and VideoCD formats), encode from a format to another (e.g. avi to mpg and vice-versa), rip DVDs to disk and convert them to .avi, downsample video/audio files, cut/paste video/audio streams, etc, etc, etc.

XMMS is the de facto audio player for GNU/Linux systems – it supports mp3, ogg and wav formats, and is skinnable and pluggable like WinAmp. It just doesn't have the spy-/junk-ware that come with WinAmp!

GNUsound is an audio-editing application, similar to the non-free Adobe Audition. You can record, edit or remaster your own music, and do many other things that I don't even understand (not a musician here, sorry :-)

.

OpenOffice.org Calc is independent of any window manager.

Gnumeric is closely tied to GNOME, and pretty much needs the entire GNOME installed to work properly.

KSpread follows the same rules, only for KDE (i.e. You must have KDE installed to use it).

ATTENTION: This screenshot is taken in the GNOME environment, but KSpead is working just fine. What's happening here?

The applications shown here:

NMap: THE network scanner

Ethereal: A network packet sniffer

Nessus: An excellent vulnerability scanner

Wavemon: A wireless device monitoring application

Lindows attempts to provide a standard, no-choice configuration, pretty much like OS vendors.

RedHat attempts to provide a unified look with its “BlueCurve” theme, which makes GNOME and KDE look pretty much the same. Some people like this integration (one interface, one set of rules), others do what they have to, to get their real desktop back.

3GB for all of the above, plus a whole bunch of development libraries for whenever I feel like compiling my kernel, GTK, QT or other applications. Not bad at all, considering that M$-Windows XP and M$-Office XP alone need that much to be functional...

Microsoft core application have traditionally been tightly bound to the OS itself. This means that when Windows XP loads, components that are used in IE or Office are already pre-loaded. That's why installing/uninstalling/upgrading/patching any M$ core application (like IE and Office) is extremely tricky. The entire OS can be destabilized or simply rendered useless by a change in an application!

Session 4 -X Applications

[StuCo 98008] Introduction to GNU/Linux

gnu linux X XFree86 kde gnome windowmaker twm gimp mozilla konqueror

This lecture provides an overview of the graphical environments and applications available in GNU/Linux. Most of these are not Linux-specific, but can also be executed on *BSD systems and other UNIX clones.
The point of this lecture is showing students that there are abundant free applications, making the choice all but overwhelming.
We'll cover the following window managers:
+ KDE
+ GNOME
+ WindowMaker
+ BlackBox
+ TWM
We'll use the following applications:
+ Mozilla (web browser and email client)
+ Konqueror (web browser and file manager)
+ Nautilus
+ Epiphany
+ Galeon
+ Mozilla Firebird
+ KMail (email client)
+ Evolution (ditto)
+ Balsa (ditto)
+ Sylpheed (ditto)
+ The GIMP (graphics manipulation program like Photoshop)
+ Dia (diagramming utility like M$-Visio)
+ OpenOffice.org (Office Suite like M$-Office)
+ KOffice (ditto)
+ AbiWord - GNumeric
+ GNUcash (like Quicken)
+ Korganizer (calendar)
+ Grip
+ MPlayer
+ XMMS

2003-09-11T14:09:36