One of the things that separates Windows from Linux or Ubuntu, a Linux distribution, is the way the operating system handles the graphical user interface. Microsoft Windows is an integral part of the operating system. It is integrated with the operating system and at this point, Windows 7, you can’t operate the computer with out the Window’s graphical interface. To be fair, you can still get to the old DOS command line by typing cmd in the run window, but it’s more there for a link to nostalgia, than it is to do day to day operations. In a lot of ways, I miss the DOS command line, I was good at it. Alas, even some of the old DOS commands are missing, like fdisk, for example. That’s all done through the windowing system, now.

In contrast, Linux has two windowing systems, KDE, and the one used in Ubuntu, Gnome. These two windowing systems are independent applications, and more important, they run as applications, just like OpenOffice or a game would run.

Linux consists of a kernal, and another layer that runs user applications, and never the twain shall meet. The kernal uses its own memory space, and each application runs in its own memory segment. If an application needs to access a disk drive, it calls the kernal, the kernal accesses the drive, and passes the information over to the calling applications memory space. Because of this the desktop can crash, say from a video game that has a bug, and it will not bring the computer down. It will just shut down that application, which you can restart from the Linux command line.

In contrast, Microsoft integrates windows with the operating system. So if you have a problem with your video driver, the entire system crashes, and you have to reboot the computer. This is one of the reasons Linux is more secure than Windows.

I mentioned you can restart an application from the command line in Ubuntu. How do we get there?  In Windows, you type cmd in the run window, and you get a black window with the command prompt.  Ubuntu is pretty much the same.  From the Gnome desktop, in the upper left corner, go to Applications->Accessories->Terminal. You’ll find a nice black window pop up with a $ prompt. Welcome to the Ubuntu Linux distribution command line.

Bringing Up the Ubuntu Terminal Window

Putting an Icon on Your Desktop

As a digression, I am at the command prompt much more often than in Windows, so I put an icon on my desktop to bring it up quickly.  To put an icon on your desktop, go back to Applications->Accessories->Terminal, but instead of left clicking to bring up the window, right click, and your given a couple of choices. You can add an icon to the laucher panel, this is a tiny icon that appears on the top bar of your screen, like the current Firefox icon, or you can add the icon to your desktop.

There is another choice, of putting it in the menu, as a drawer, the equivalent of a folder in Windows, or a an actual menu item.  Since we’re making an icon for the desktop, we don’t need to put it in the menu, since it’s already there.  By the way,  if you would like to rearrange your menus, change the drawers, or remove some menu items, the menus are completely configurable.  Go to the Applications choice on the top menu bar, for example, right click and select “Edit Menus.”

Back to the terminal window, the terminal window gives you complete access to the Ubuntu distro,  i.e. the Linux operating system command line, and its plentiful commands, but that is the subject of another post.  As a teaser, I’ll give you a couple of commands to get you started.    Everything is in lower case, type “pwd” for print working directory.   It tells you where you are.  Type, “ls” to list the files in that directory, or better “ls -al” to get a long alphabetical listing.  Some things come from DOS.  Type “cd ..” for change directory  to move up one level in the directory structure, and or to go down, type the name of the directory , for example,  “cd home”  goes down to the home directory, that should keep you busy for awhile.  Have fun and enjoy Ubuntu.

And finally, less we get carried away, you can still explore your file system through the GNOME graphical user interface, like Windows Explorer, without using the terminal window or the command line, by going to the “Places” menu in the upper tool bar.

In my last post, we covered the GET method, get is one of two methods used to get information from the client’s browser to the server, the other method being “POST.” You’ll find that “post,” by a wide margin, is the method used by developers, over the less secure, “get.”

The post method is used when you have a large amount of data in your form, and when you want to be more secure with the data, and not have it so visible, as with the “get” method.

Let’s have a little fun and review forms a bit, we’ll start with a form the developer might put on a page for the user to fill out in his browser window. Here’s the body of the html with the form.

Tell Us about Yourself


First Name: 


Last Name: 


 My favorite ice cream flavors are (pick all that you like): 
French Vanilla
Chocolate
Black Rasberry
Vanilla Fudge
Strawberry
Cookie Dough
Coffee

What is your favorite pet?
Dogs
Cats
Horses
Parrots
Snakes
I don't like pets

What is the make of the current car you drive:


Buick
Ford
Chevy
Dodge
Pontiac
Toyota
BMW
Mercedes Benz
Other


Tell us about your favoite hobby and why you like it: 

And here is what the form will look like in the browser. I’ve filled in some example data in the form in the browser window for us to use in the next file. In this case the form action will send the form information to “formctrl.php” which we’ll will use to echo out the data.

Here is the php code, minus the php tags, we’ll use to retrieve the data in the “formctrl.php” file, and then, in this case, echo out the data to the screen. Notice that the syntax to retrieve the data is the same as we used for “get,” except we substitute the word, “post,” instead. The data variable in the post portion comes from the “name” tag in the form for each input method.

In the case of asking for ice cream flavors, we selected more than one choice, so we created an array by putting an [] after the name in he checkbox, called, “checkit[]” To retrieve the data from the array, we initialized an array variable in the next file, “$checked,” and then use a foreach loop, and go through the array one choice at a time to retrieve the choices.

$fname   = $_POST['fname'];                  // First Name
$lname   = $_POST['lname'];                  // Last Name
$checked = array();
$checked  = $_POST['checkit'];              // Ice Flavors
$radsel   = $_POST['radioselect'];           // Favorite Pet
$dropcar   = $_POST['dropdowncar'];      // Car
$note   = $_POST['notes'];                    // Comments

echo "And now let's check the data from the form.";
echo "";
echo "";
echo "Hello, Mr. ". $lname . ",";
echo "";
echo "Or can we call you, ". $fname ."," ;
echo "";
echo "What are some of your favorite ice cream flavors?";
echo ""; 

foreach ($checked as $ic ){
   echo "I like ". $ic ."";
   }

echo "";
echo "And what is your favorite kind of pet? ". $radsel .".";
echo "";
echo "";
echo "Thanks ". $fname.",";
echo "";
echo "Can you give me a ride?  ";
echo "What kind of car do you drive?";
echo "";
echo "Yes, a ".$dropcar .".";
echo "";
echo "Any thing more you'd like to say?: " . $note  ;
echo "";
echo "OK, What ever you say, Let's go! ";

And here is what the output of the above file will look like in the browser window.

I think from the above example you can see why “post” is the most popular method used with forms, the user’s data remains hidden until you specifically get the data in the next file.

We’ve covered passing the user’s information from his browser to a file on the server. We’ll next move on to keeping information about an individual user separate from another user, and retrieving it later.

Wow, this is big. It is no secret that Sun has fallen on some tough times lately. Sun had a total revenue of $11.45 billion last year down from $13.88 billion the year before. In contrast, Oracle’s last year revenues were $23.23 Billion. The combined revenues of both companies should approach $35 billion. Microsoft currently checks in at $56.3 billion. We’re looking at the heavy weights going at it. With Microsoft on the decline, Google at $23.65 billion on the rise, and now Oracle stepping up into the fray, this may become a very interesting war. Oracle acquired Sun for a mere $7.4 billion, a steal.

Oracle’s revenue comes from it’s pervasive Oracle database. Depending on how you look at it revenue, or installs. Oracle is in the top 2 with Microsoft and IBM’s DB2 a close third. Let’s not forget, MySql is the most popular Open Source, i.e free, database in the world. What is surprising is when you look at installs and the number of developers developing with a database, MySql comes in a close 3rd to Oracle and Microsoft, with DB2 fourth, and MySql shows the greatest growth rate of all database development.

Oracle’s acquisition of the MySql product may be a problem for the Open Source community. Sun owned MySQL, which now belongs to Oracle. If you remember, Oracle purchased PeopleSoft in Dec. 2004 for $10.3 billion. In Oct, 2005 they acquired Innobase which is an integral part of MySql for transaction processing and foreign keys. What will Oracle do with MySql has caused a huge concern with the Open Source Community, so much so, that their already has been several forks of MySql, Drizzle, and MariaDB, just in case Oracle starts charging for MySql. For now, Oracle pledges to leave MySql independent, but this is to be expected in the initial stages of an acquisition, things usually change in six months or so.

My thought is they will continue to support an Open Source MySql and build on top of MySql additional tools, extensions, and integrations with other Oracle products with, of course, a clear upgrade path to Oracle’s flagship products for which the enterprise users will pay dearly.

And the same for OpenOffice.org, a legitimate contender, now, of Microsoft Office. Oracle has never had an Office Suite and has wanted one. Oracle is built with Java, as is OpenOffice.org. Again, tools, extensions, and integrations with Oracle products seems like a nice way to get users to start paying for more and more functionality from a previously non-existent Oracle Office Products.

Oracle keeping the Open Source products they have acquired free, and enhancing them, at first, to gain market share seems like good business sense, but as these applications gain more and more market share, I believe Oracle will take a page from Microsoft’s play book, and start charging for their enhancements to the products. What this means for Open Source, is a freezing of the Open Source components to a minimal feature level, and if you want more, pay for it.

I have great faith in Open Source software, the forking of MySql is evidence that independent Open Source Developers will continue to create other applications with the missing functionality, that Oracle will ask customers to purchase. As MySql has emerged as the premier Open Source database, so other products can, and will, emerge to take its place, if Oracle begins to get as “bean counterish” as Microsoft is currently, with it prideful boasting about “Microsoft Genuine Advantage,” and its publicly crowing about the number of companies they have sued, look for any closing down, of previously Open Source Oracle products to be a catalyst to breed a new generation of improved Open Source products.

Last post we talked about how we normally get data into a system with a form. The user enters his information into the form and clicks the submit button. The browser then sends the data to the server.

Back at the server, php sets aside some memory, the server stores the information in that memory location, and calls the next page. That page is what the developer specified in the form command.

Here’s the form again:

In this case, the action parameter tells the server what file to go to next, controller.php.

The more interesting questions are how the browser passes the information to the server, and how the controller.php file gets that information out of memory. Those questions are answered by the method parameter in the form tag, in this case, GET. Get is one of the two methods you can use to get data from the browser to your program file.

The GET method tells the browser to package the site and form data as part of the URL sent to the server calling the next page. For example, if we go to the W3C site at http://www.w3.org/ , and in the Google search box on the right side type, “CSS,” click the magnifying glass, and look at the URL at the top of the page.

You’ll see: “http://www.google.com/search?q=site:w3.org&q=css&search-submit=” The browser packaged the site “w3.org”, the variable data, “css,” and the variable, “search,” into the URL after the “?”

Now, to get this information into the controller.php file with use the php $_GET method.

And here’s how you get the data into the controller.php file:

$searchinfo = $_GET['searchit'];

Notice how the name parameter of the input tag, searchit, is the name of the variable we use to GET the information back out of memory.

if we echo the variable we just created, $searchinfo ,

echo "The search word is: ". $searchinfo;

The answer we get is:

The search word is: css

We’ve passed the data from the form input page to the controller.php page.

Now some thoughts. The best place to use get is with queries, as shown above, not when your passing sensitive information, like your social security number. Why? For obvious reasons, all your information is in the URL for anybody to see. GET is not secure, but for a search box, it’s fast and easy.

Another thing, the URL has a maximum size. Surprising it is mostly set by the browser you use, Internet Explorer is 2048 characters, Firefox is 65,536, Safari is 80,000 and Opera in 190,000. Nothing to really worry about, but its best to keep the “Get” method to short queries back to the server. Get gets a bad rap for messing up the URL line, and putting the data out there for everyone to see. It’s not used that much, except for search queries, mostly form data is posted, which we’ll talk about next.

We can’t pass data to another page until we have some data.  The way we  input data in web pages is with forms.  Forms are created with html, more easily created with html then styled in CSS, but that’s another article.

Forms are created with the <form> tag, and of course, the form ends with a </form> tag.  Form is a block element.  Any submitting elements between these two tags are processed as being part of the form.

Let’s create a form with some input elements as an example of proper html syntax:

First Name







Notes




Select an Option

   Ford
   Chevy
   BMW




Pre School Checklist:
Pencil:

Notebook:

Textbook:

Pack:




Pick your Poison:
 Cauleflour 
 Brussel Sprouts 
 Black Beans 

The above code yields a form that looks like the image below in your browser (click to enlarge image).

You fill in the form on the web page, click the, “Click me when the form is filled out!” button, and the data you entered into the form is sent to the file “../controllers/example_controller.php” which you specified in the action parameter in the opening form tag.

Some notes on the form itself, I included a hidden field not displayed in your browser window.  Now don’t get excited about secret codes, or something evil you could pass in to the site, because this is not secure.  All you have to do is View->PageSource in your browser, and you can see the “hidden field” value. It is not used a lot because of this, but it can be used if you want to pass some data to another page when the form is submitted that would not be normally obvious to a user.

You’ll notice that each type of input has a “name” tag. The “name” tag is important, it’s how you identify the the data that is coming to the next page.  For example, the name of the first input box is “firstname,” when I get to the next page, I’m going to ask for “firsname” when I want the contents of that input, Which brings us to the topic at hand, passing data to another page.

We can pass form data to the, “../controllers/example_controller.php” file in one of two ways either “Get,” or “Post.”  The method we use to send the data is a parameter in the initial form tag, like so, method = “post,” or method=”get”  We’ll cover this in our next article.  For now, in our initial web page we have collected the data, when the user clicks on the submit button, we pass the data to another page or file.  And we’ll talk about what the receiver file has to do to catch the data in our next article.

This is the start of a new series of articles on passing variables.  A series about coding web pages with PHP.  PHP is an interactive, interpretive, scripting language that works well with HTML to communicate with the database, and create dynamic applications for the Internet. As such this series will combine HTML and PHP to accomplish varies tasks.

The focus will be on passing variables.  Why passing variables?  Because the Internet is stateless.  By stateless, I mean that every request going to the Internet server is independent of any other request.  The Apache server delivers a web page from the server to the browser on your computer, and when you click on another link, probably a new server will deliver another page. The servers could be physically located half a world apart.  How do we move data from one page to the other when each page stands on it own?  The new page that loads, does not know anything about the preceding page, unless of course, you pass some informaton from the one page to the other.

And that’s where the problems start.  If I assign a variable on one page, that variable ceases to exist in the new page.  It’s gone.  Variables only persist while in an individual page.  If I type in my name on an Internet page, how does the new page repeat my name back, like Amazon does when you log in?

Well, that’s a good question and the subject of this series.  By passing variables, I mean passing data, whether its your name, or phone number, or the results you entered in a survey from one web page to another, or from the web page to the database and back to another web page.  We’ll focus on “Passing Variables,” getting data moving around your system.

“Passing Variables” probably causes more problems in coding than any other issue.  You pass the data a user fills out in a form, back to a “controller” file.  This takes in the information, and assigns the indivual data to variables or an array.  The information is validated and if there is an error, an error screen will be called, if the data is ok, We can pass these variables back to a “model” file for saving in a database, again passing variables between pages.

The next page comes up, calls a function to get the informaton out of the database, passes the data back to the new page, the new page shows the same form with the information you filled in the form populated in the form.  The form page you filled in is a different page then the page that had the blank form you initially filled out, with perhaps an error message, saying a field you forgot is required.

We will cover some HTML and more PHP.  Topics I hope to cover are: Forms, Get, Post, Cookies, Sessions, function variables, returns, arrays, and passing objects.  As far as syntax, we will eliminate any extraneous html or php that is not necessary to make our point. You’ll see no div’s, or ul’s. or li’s.  We assume you know what needs to go else where in the page to make it work, and are reading the post, because you just need that snippet of code to make it work.  We definitely want to make the page an easy reference when your stuck to quickly look up the right code sequence and syntax, and you just want to know how to do that…

And with that…we’re off…

By now you are familiar with the initial installed Ubuntu background.  When you use a computer every day, you know that after awhile you want to change the appearance of your computer, just as a change of pace.  Ubuntu has not forgotten the aesthetics, and gives you just as many choices as Windows.

The Initial Ubuntu Background

For those Windows users, Windows calls their background the desktop, and the way you change the picture on the desktop in Windows is to right click on the desktop, and bring up the properties menus.  In the properties menu you can change the theme and sounds, the desktop picture, what you use for a screensaver, the appearance of menus, and the screen resolution.

Let’s see what we can do with Ubuntu.  Just like in Windows, right click on your desktop, and there you will find a “Change Desktop Background,” menu,  left click, and up comes “Appearance Preferences.”  You’ll find 22 backgrounds you can choose from, or if you click the “Add” button you can use any of your pictures.  You can also down load additional pictures from Gnome Art.  Remember Gnome is name of the Graphic User Interface that Ubuntu uses.  This site has a bunch of additional themes and backgrounds that are easily downloaded and installed by clicking on the “Get more backgrounds online” link.

A New Background

Through the upper tab menus on Appearance Preferences,  you can change the theme, by changing the look of your: controls, colors, window borders, icons, and mouse pointers. Not only that you can change the fonts that are used along with the size of the fonts for menus and documents from the fonts menu. If your eyes need a little bit bigger fonts it’s no problem to adjust them here.

Font Preferences

There’s one other thing you may want to change, and that is your screen saver.  To change your screen saver in Ubuntu, go to the “System” menu in your upper left menu, click on “Preferences” and then “Screensaver.”  This is also where you can configure Ubuntu to go to “sleep” after a period of inactivity or just to shut the display off.  This is under the “Power Management” menu in “Screensaver Preferences.”

Screensaver Preferences

In summary, you can change the entire look of Ubuntu, and make it your own with a few clicks of the mouse.

Ubuntu comes with drivers for most of your peripherals, except printer drivers, which normally are installed separately.  In a previous blog I have written favorably about the Canon MX850 compared to the equivalent HP ink-jet all-in-one printers.  Having a good feeling about Canon, I went to their web site and made an email inquiry about a printer driver for Ubuntu.  Here is their reply, “While considering the desire to provide the best possible support for Canon’s products, Canon must make decisions on which products to support when new operating systems are introduced.  Currently, Canon has decided to support only the Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh operating systems.”

Pardon me, Canon, but Ubuntu and Linux are not new operating systems.  They’ve been around almost as long as Windows, and the Apple operating system is based on Linux.

Have no fear, though, this happens occasionally and what you’ll find when you go looking for a solution is other solutions.  Searching further, for Canon printer drivers, there is a free solution, the CUPS-BNJP Printer Driver, which mimics the Canon BNJP printer protocol for the Canon Pixma printers and works over the network. This also works with the XSane scanning software provided with Ubuntu to allow scanning of documents.

CUPS-BNJP is based on CUPS, CUPS works with other printers besides Canon.  It was built for the Fedora distribution of Linux.  Since Ubuntu uses the Debian distribution, there may or may not be an issue in using CUPS with Ubuntu.  We can check that easily.  If you go to Applications->Ubuntu Software Center->Get Free Software->System Tools and scan through the list of available software, you’ll come to two choices: Printing, Printers.   If you click on “Printing,”  a CUPS printer driver is available.  “Printers” on the menu system gives you a GUI interface between CUPS and the printer.

CUPS uses your web browser to view print jobs, manage your printers, and for online help.  However, it makes use of the command line for its configuration.  The printer GUI in the Ubuntu Software Center. according to the software description,  seemed like it depended on some other software for configuring remote printers on a LAN,  if you don’t want to install a series of dependent software, or if you prefer not to use the command line interface, you probably want to check out a commercial solution, TurboPrint 2 for Linux.

TurboPrint 2 supports ink-jet printer’s from: HP, Bother, Epson, and Canon for all Linux distributions.  For the modest cost of $29 you can be ensured that you printer will function, and pick up a nice set of additional features with the software.

TurboPrint2 features include: high print resolutions, color management that matches screen document color to printed color, printer status monitoring to track print progress and errors, like a low ink cartridge, printing on both sides of the paper, print preview of what your about to print, and intelligent ink management to save ink and extend cartridge life. The one remaining question that I had is will it work on a printer attached to your network, and it will.  This intelligent printer utility has Windows and individual manufacturers printer drivers beat hands down.

The company provides a trial version to see if it will work on your system. You can download from the web and hook it up and if everything works, then purchase the software.  What’s not to like!

Given I was not sure about the Cups-BNJP distribution with Ubunutu,  the GUI configuration tool appeared to need additional software to pick up my printer on my LAN,  which meant there may be some additional configuration issues beyond just downloading the software, and  a free trial of TurboPrint was available, I decided to go with the TurboPrint option and give it a try.

TurboPrint Control Center and Printer Monitor

I downloaded the correct distribution for Ubuntu from their website. Clicked on the install button, the install wizard came up and installed the software.  The installation was painless.  The only thing that made me pause was the request to add a printer before other functionality was available.  This is done with the “Add” button in the Print Control Center.  My model Canon was recognized immediately on my LAN and that was it.  I printed a test page, checked the level of my ink cartridges, and was suitably impressed.

Considering I didn’t have to read any documentation, install several pieces of software,  or potentially do a command line configuration of the printer.  I was up and running in 5 minutes,  and had some one to turn to for support if any problems cropped up, it certainly is worth the $29 asking price for Turbo Print to me,  so much for printer drivers.

We’ve downloaded Ubuntu 9.10 from their web site, downloaded the Infrarecorder program, to burn the Ubuntu iso file to a CD, not a DVD, built a computer from hardware components, and loaded the Ubuntu operating system. Loading Ubuntu takes less time than it takes to load Windows, and you don’t have to register the product.

What most people, who have not tried Ubuntu, don’t know is that Ubuntu comes with a bunch of free applications that load with the operating system. Let’s briefly go over these applications, as a way to show you that you have a complete computer when you load Ubuntu.

Email: Ubuntu has an email program called Evolution.  Evolution is more than just an email program though, it is a full fledged Personal Information Manager with email, calendar, contacts, address book, memos, and tasks.  It can sync with your PDA, mobile phone, and Microsoft Outlook. It was the easiest email program I have ever set up. Presto, your getting your emails.

Instant Messaging: If your in to chatting with your friends with instant messaging, Ubuntu comes with an instant messaging program, called Empathy that will allow you to integrate Gmail, AIM, Windows LiVe, Jabber, AOL, Yahoo, QQ, etc.

Web Browser: Firefox and if you attach an Ethernet cable to your computer when you initially load Ubuntu, click on the browser, and presto, your on the Internet.  Ubuntu sets every thing up for you.

Office Applications: Let’s cover these all at once.  Open Office.org was developed by Sun, to compete with Microsoft Office, Sun gave the application and source code to the community, and it is now maintained as Open Source software, it’s free, and comes loaded with Ubuntu.  It can read and save documents in Microsoft format, so other’s can read your documents, and you can read the Microsoft documents other’s send you.  Ubuntu has renamed the Open Office.org program names to make things understandable. Let’s go through each program with the Windows equivalent: Word Processor – Microsoft Word, Spreadsheet – Excel, Presentation – Powerpoint, Evolution – Outlook, and Drawing – Paint.  Open Office.org also has a database program, you can install.

Ubuntu One gives you an interface and 2 Gb’s of storage on the Internet for you to use to transfer files from one computer to another over the Internet.

For graphics, we have F-Spot, a photo manager, you can manage all your photos and pictures.  GIMP, a photo editing program that has been around for years and has the functionality of Adobe Photoshop. If you have a scanner, there’s Image Scanning software called XSane.

Ubuntu has a music application, called Rythmbox, that resembles Winamp in functionality with a music player and library, but unfortunately is not quite there in the skins department.  It does have an internet radio library and an icon for Last.fm. You can download music, buy music, download your Ipod and MP3’s, and listen to podcasts. There’s an audio and media player, the Totem Movie Player.  This will handle a multitude of formats and supports full screen video playback to view your favorite movies.

There are games for you to play: Logic, AisleRiot Solitaire, Blackjack, Chess, Gnometris, Lagno, Mahjongg, Nibbles, Robots, and Tali.

And the “piece de resistance” the Ubuntu Software Center.  This is an easy to use catalog laid out in a nice interface that loads other application that run on Ubuntu.  The Software Center loads these programs with a click of the mouse.  It also removes software you’re no longer using. This is all done with a few clicks of the mouse.  You don’t have to search all over the Internet for software, Ubuntu takes care of all of that for you.

Let’s take a tour of the Ubuntu Desktop.  The Ubuntu Desktop, really the Gnome desktop, is divided into three main sections: two panels, which are the bars along the top and bottom, and a desktop in the middle.  The top panel bar has menus, icons, date and time, and a power icon with your name on it, which is used to shut down the computer. The bottom panel has a desktop switcher, a trash icon, and icons for your desktops.

The Application Menu & Accessories Category

I think you’ll find the menus are laid out much better than the Windows layout.  The menu applet contains three menus, and you can customize your own menu if you like.  The first menu, the Applications menu, provides easy access to every program installed on your computer.  The menu is laid out a little different than Windows, because menus are grouped into categories: Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Sound and Video, and the Ubuntu Software Center.  If you run through each of these sub menus you’ll find that Ubuntu provides you with a lot of applications when you first load your operating system.

The Ubuntu Software Center

The last choice on the Applications Menu, the Ubuntu Software Center, is a little like Windows “Add & Remove” programs only laid out a tad better with more functionality.  The Software Center tracks all installed programs, let’s you remove them, locates free software on the internet that will run with Ubuntu, and installs the program of your choice on your system, installing the program in a category in your Applications Menu with an icon, program name, and brief description of the program, nice.  What’s nice is that you don’t have to go looking for a download site, download the file, unzip it, and install it, the Software Center takes care of all of that for you.  You can go ahead and open all of these initial Ubuntu programs and check them out, to shut a program down, click the X in the upper right corner of the application, just like in Windows.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the functionality that Ubuntu provides with the operating system.

THe Places Menu

The Places menu is like Windows, My Documents, Explorer, and recent Documents all-in-ome.  This is where you can find all your files on your computer.  All of your music, video, documents, and other data are stored in the Places folders and are easily available to you.  This is your files system, places on your computer where your data is stored.  Double click on any folder and an explorer like windows opens to show you the files in your folder.  Want to move a file to a different folder, click on it and drag it to the new folder.  Want to make a new folder, right click, like in Windows.

The Systems Menu is like the Windows Control Panel and Device Manager, in it you can change the appearance of your desktop, configure your system, install printers, networks, drivers, and run various system utilities.

The Systems Menu and Update Manager

One program I want to have you run right now is under Administration->Update Manager.  This program keeps all the software on your system up to date.  Click “Check”, put in your password, and let the program go to work.  When I initially installed Ubuntu, I had 41 things that needed updating, let the program run and do it’s job. Presto your system is updated.

Icons, like icons in Windows, are used to launch or start programs.  You should find the help icon and probably the firefox icon in the top panel.  You can add more icons by right click->Add to Panel, find the program you want to put on the top bar your done.  When I initially loaded Ubuntu I was playing with the desktop and had all my menus disappear.  If this happens to you, don’t panic, go to the top panel, right click, Add to Panel->Main Menu.  You can also add your own custom menu.  I did say every thing on the desktop could be moved, if you don’t like where the icons are, move them by unlocking the “Lock to Panel” in the right click menu for each item and then drag the icon to a new location and lock it again.   The other icons toward the right in the top panel are for: sound with a volume control, networking with information about your network connection, and empathy and email applet that you can use to set up your emails.

This brings us to the date and time.  Right click and you can copy time and date to place in your documents, left click and you’ll see a calendar with a day/night clock which allows you to edit date and time and put locations on the world map.  When you put in a location in the world, a clock will appear below the day/night clock showing the time at that location.  To close this application, you’ll have to click on the top icon again. This is much better than the Windows calendar and clock set up.  The last icon in the top panel with your name allows you to turn off your computer.

The next main section below the top panel is the desktop.  The desktop is like the Windows desktop, it can contain files, folders, and icons to start applications.  You can create a new folder, document, or launcher, an icon to start a program.

The bottom panel starting from the left, has a desktop swithching applet, if you click on it you’ll switch between your open windows and another desktop.  A desktop is the same as the main section described in the last paragraph, only you can have as many desktops as you want. In each desktop you can have a series of open applications which will appear as tabs in the bottom panel just like in Windows.  A desktop for your spreadsheet, one for email, one for playing a game. If you look over to the right on the bottom panel you will see desktop icons.  Each icon is one of your desktops.  Click on them to switch to a specific desktop.

The Trash Folder

The final icon on the far left is your trash folder.  It operates just like the Windows trash folder, in that a deleted file will not be removed from the system, until you specifically “Empty Trash.”  If you click on the trash icon you will open an explorer window showing your trash folder.

I think you can see from this overview that the Ubuntu Desktop has everything you need to take charge of your computer.  As I mentioned earlier, I think the layout is easier to use and more understandable then Windows ever was.