Hello and welcome to this spoken tutorial on Ubuntu Linux Desktop 16.04.
In this tutorial, we will learn about Ubuntu Linux Desktop on the gnome environment
and some common applications on the Ubuntu Desktop.
To record this tutorial, I am using Ubuntu Linux 16.04 O S.
The Ubuntu desktop looks like this.
You'll see the launcher on the left hand side of the screen.
How can we hide the launcher?
To do so, go to the launcher on the left side. Click on the System Settings icon.
In the System Settings window, click on Appearance.
In the Appearance window, click on the Behavior tab.
Here, switch Auto-hide the Launcher to ON position.
Now the launcher will be hidden.
If the launcher is hidden, as shown here, then we can make it visible again.
To do so, move the cursor to the extreme left of the screen.
The launcher will become visible.
Move the cursor away and the launcher will get hidden again.
Switch back to the Appearance window and turn Auto-hide the Launcher to OFF position.
Close this window by clicking on the tiny X icon at the top left of the window.
Notice, there are some icons on the launcher, by default.
At the top of the launcher, you can see the Dash home icon.
Dash home is an interface which gives access to all applications in Ubuntu Linux, within a screen.
To open Dash home, click on it.
Prominently at the top, you'll see the search bar field.
Now, how do we locate a particular application? Just type in the name of the application you are looking for and you will find it instantly. It's that simple!
Let’s try to locate the Calculator application.
So, in the search bar field, type C a l c.
All the applications that have c a l c in their name, will be listed.
Observe here - both LibreOffice Calc and Calculator are listed.
Click on the Calculator icon. The Calculator application now opens on the screen.
Calculator helps perform arithmetic, scientific or financial calculations.
Let us try some simple calculation.
Type 5 asterisk 8 and click on the equal to (=) sign.
Instead of clicking on the equal to sign, you can also press the Enter key on the keyboard.
The answer is displayed on the Calculator.
Likewise, we can do all sort of calculations using the Calculator application.
Now, exit this Calculator by clicking on this tiny X icon at the top left of the window.
Let’s get familiar with some other important applications in Ubuntu Linux OS.
For that, we will go back to Dash home.
In the Search bar, let’s type gedit. gedit is the default Text Editor in the Ubuntu Linux OS.
The Text Editor icon appears below. Let’s click on it to open it.
What you see right now on the screen, is the gedit Text Editor window.
Let me type some text here. For example, type: "Hello World".
To save the file, press Ctrl and S keys simultaneously on the keyboard.
Alternately, we can click on File and then on Save.
Now, a dialog box named “Save as” opens up. It asks for a filename and the location where the file has to be saved.
So, let’s type the name as "Hello.txt".
.txt is the default extension of a text file.
And for location, let’s select Desktop. And, click on the Save button at the bottom.
Let's close this gedit window now by clicking on the tiny X icon at the top left of the window.
On the Desktop, we can see the file Hello.txt. This means our text file was saved successfully.
Let me open this file by double-clicking on it.
See, our text file has opened with our written text.
The internet has a lot of information on gedit Text Editor.
There are some spoken tutorials available on this topic also, on this website.
Let's close this text editor and look at another application i.e the Terminal.
So, let's go to Dash home once again. Now type the word terminal in the search bar field.
Click on the Terminal icon that appears below.
The terminal window opens on the screen. Please note: The shortcut to open the Terminal is Ctrl+Alt+T keys.
The terminal is also called the command line. This is because you can command the computer from here.
In fact, it is more powerful than the GUI.
Let me switch back to the Terminal window.
Now let ’s type a simple command to get a feel of the terminal. Type 'ls' and press Enter.
You can see a list of all the files and folders in the current directory.
Here, it is displaying files and folders from the Home folder.
We will see later in this tutorial, what the Home folder is.
We will not spend any more time with the terminal now.
Close the terminal by clicking on the tiny X icon at the top left of the window.
Terminal commands are explained well in the Linux spoken-tutorial series on this website.
Now, let's move on to another application i.e Firefox Web Browser.
Once again, open Dash home. Type Firefox in the search bar.
Click on the Firefox Web Browser icon.
Firefox Web Browser is used to access the world wide web. Now we can see that Firefox browser window is open.
Let ’s go to the spoken tutorial website. For that, click on the address bar or press F6 on the keyboard.
Now let’s type "spoken-tutorial.org" and press Enter.
If you have Internet connectivity, then Firefox will connect to the given website.
The Spoken Tutorial Homepage opens on the browser.
Let's close this as explained earlier and move on to the next application.
So, let's go to Dash home once again and type office in the search bar.
You'll see various LibreOffice components like Calc, Impress, Writer and Draw.
LibreOffice is the default office application in Ubuntu Linux OS.
Excellent tutorials for all these components are available on the Spoken Tutorial website.
Now let's explore the Video option.
Type video in the search bar.
In the displayed list, we have one application named Videos.
Videos is used to play videos and songs. By default, it plays open format video files only.
So, let me play a sample file from my pen-drive.
Now, I am inserting my pen-drive in a usb slot on my machine. The pen-drive folder has opened automatically.
If it does not open, we can access it from the launcher.
Locate the pen-drive icon on the launcher.
If we click on it, it shows the files and folders available on the pen-drive.
Now I will select the movie file big buck bunny.ogv to play.
Here is my file. I will double-click on it, to open.
It opens in Videos, by default.
Let's stop playing the movie.
Let us now press Ctrl, Windows and D keys to go to the Desktop.
Now let's see some other important things on this Desktop.
Notice the folder icon present in the launcher. Let's click on it.
The Home folder opens.
Every user has a unique Home folder in Ubuntu Linux.
We can say that the Home folder is our house where we can store our files and folders. Unless we permit, others cannot see them.
More information on file permissions is available in the Linux spoken-tutorial series.
Let’s switch back. In our Home folder, we can see other folders such as- Desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc.
In Linux, everything is a file. Let ’s open the Desktop folder by double -clicking on it.
Here, we can see that the same "hello.txt" file that we saved from the text editor.
So, this folder and the Desktop are the same.
Let me close this folder now. That’s all for this tutorial. Let us summarise.
In this tutorial we learnt about- the Ubuntu Desktop, the launcher and some of the icons available on it,
few common applications like- Calculator, Text Editor, Terminal, Firefox Web Browser, Videos and LibreOffice Suite components and the Home folder.
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The script for this tutorial has been contributed by the Spoken Tutorial Team. And this is Praveen from IIT Bombay, signing off. Thanks for joining.