Howtos

Wiki Specific

1. Howto Get Involved with the Ubuntu GNOME Team.

2. Howto Get the Best out of the Ubuntu GNOME Wiki Area.

3. Howto Create a Wiki Page.

Ubuntu GNOME Basic Howtos

Bring up the GNOME Shell

It is intuitive, but this is the most important task for the novice users. Click on Activities in the top left corner of the screen or press the Super key (previously known as Windows key) to bring up the GNOME Shell. This is the place where you can see your open windows, change workspaces and, of course, search for and run your favourite applications.

Change your desktop background (wallpaper)

1. Right-click on the desktop and select Change Background.... You can also bring up the GNOME Shell and search for Background to open the Background system settings' window.

2. Choose a wallpaper included in Ubuntu GNOME, select your own wallpaper from the Pictures folder or pick a solid color for your background or lock screen.

Change the theme and fonts to customize the look of Ubuntu GNOME

A lot of the appeal of Ubuntu in general is its flexibility. One of the most obvious ways to customize a operating system is through its look. You can do this by changing the theme and fonts.

Theme

To change the theme, it is best to use GNOME Tweak Tool – an application which is included by default in the Ubuntu GNOME installation. If not, you can install it from the Software Center or throughout the command-line (by running sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool in Terminal).

Once you have GNOME Tweak Tool installed, bring up the GNOME Shell and search for Tweak Tool. Then run the application and select the Theme tab. All the theme settings can be changed here (desktop theme, cursor theme, icon theme, etc.). Many more themes than the ones on the list are available for download. GNOME-Look.org is a great place to look for more themes.

Fonts

All font settings are available in the Fonts tab – here you can not only change system fonts, but hinting and antialiasing, too.

Change your system settings

1. Bring up the GNOME Shell and search for System Settings.

2. Here you can change your personal, hardware or system settings. Click on an item to open its settings.

Software Management

Install software

Adding software in Ubuntu is really simple, easy and fast, which is one of the advantages the operating system has over other distributions. To add software in Ubuntu GNOME:

1. Bring up the GNOME Shell and search for Ubuntu Software Center.

2. Select from hundreds of free or paid applications.

3. Click Install to install an application on your hard disk drive.

If you want to install a more obscure package, you will need to do some simple work in Terminal. A good place to start learning about this is on the AptGet Howto page.

Install software from a .deb file

Installing software from a .deb file is not normally necessary, but it can make life easier at times. For example, a newer version of your favourite application is available on the developer's official site in a .deb package, but not in the repositories of Ubuntu. Installing from a .deb file can be accomplished several ways in Ubuntu GNOME.

Via Terminal

To install a single .deb package, run the following command:

• sudo dpkg -i package-name-here.deb

OR

• sudo dpkg --install package-name-here.deb

To install several .deb packages from the same directory run the following command:

• sudo dpkg -i -R /path/to/dir/name/with/lots/of/dot-deb-files/

OR

• sudo dpkg -i --recursive /path/to/dir/name/with/lots/of/dot-deb-files/

Via Ubuntu Software Center

To install software from a .deb file via Ubuntu Software Center, simply double click on the .deb file. Ubuntu Software Center will handle the installation for you.

Install Java

Installing Java (JRE and JDK) is one of the first things that many developers will want to do. While OpenJDK works 99% of the time, some may want true Oracle Java. For those people, the Ubuntu Community Java Documentation will be a good place to start reading.

Install Oracle Java

The easiest way to install the latest version of Oracle Java on your machine is by using the Web Upd8 personal package archive (PPA).

Open Terminal and run the following commands:

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

• sudo apt-get update

• sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

Install OpenJRE and OpenJDK

OpenJRE or OpenJDK can be installed via Ubuntu Software Center or Terminal.

Open Terminal and run the following command to install OpenJRE:

• sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

Open Terminal and run the following command to install OpenJDK:

• sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Ubuntu GNOME Advanced Howto

Device Management

Mount a USB flash drive via Terminal

Via the graphical user inteface of Ubuntu GNOME you can easily mount and then use a USB flash drive by plugging it in one of your computer's USB ports. In some special cases this task can be done throughout the command-line (via Terminal).

First of all, you need to create a mount point for the device (a directory where the device will be mounted). To create a new directory, run the following command:

• sudo mkdir /media/Label

You can change Label with the name you want your mounted device to appear in the /media folder. It is recommended not to use spaces, because things get complicated. In order to separate words, spaces can be substituted with a underscore.

To mount the device, run the following command:

• sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/Label

Where sdb1 stands for the plugged in the USB port device. But what does actually sdb1 mean?

• hda – the first installed IDE device (hard disk drive)

• hda1 – the first partition of the hda device

• hda2 – the second partition of the hda device, etc.

• hdb – the second installed IDE device (hard disk drive)

• hdb1 – the first partition of the hdb device, etc.

• sda – the first installed SCSI device (SATA hard disk drive or USB flash drive)

• sda1 – the first partition of the sda device, etc.

If you have only one SCSI device installed (SATA hard disk drive), its generated name is probably sda and your Ubuntu GNOME working partition is sda1. When you insert a USB flash drive in the USB port of your computer (e.g. it is another SCSI device), its name will be sdb and its working partition's name will be sdb1. If you add one more USB flash drive its names will be sdc for the device and sdc1 for its working partition respectively.

Unmount a USB flash drive via Terminal

To unmount a USB flash drive via Terminal, run the following command:

• sudo umount /dev/sdb1

Format a USB flash drive via Terminal

Most USB flash drives are formatted under the FAT32 filesystem. To format a USB flash drive in FAT32 via Terminal run the following command:

• sudo mkdosfs -n 'Label' -I /dev/sdb1 -F 32

Change file permissions

When you start compiling source code, or even downloading .JAR files that you want to execute, you will need to learn to change file permissions. File permissions simply tell your computer who is allowed to do what to a certain file or folder in the file system. To learn more about permissions have a read on Wikipedia.

Via the GUI

For most beginner users, changing permissions via the graphics user interface (GUI) is the easiest. To do this, simply right click on the file whose permissions you want to change, and switch to the Permissions tab. From here, you can change individual users', groups', and others' read and write permissions, as well as allow the execution of the file as a program.

Via Terminal

In order to proceed, you will need to have an adequate understanding of both symbolic and numeric permissions notations. There is an in depth but brief explanation of this on Wikipedia.

To change file permissions via Terminal, first navigate to your target by running:

• cd /path/to/your/file/

Then,

• sudo chmod 0### yourfile.extension

where ### are replaced with the appropriate permissions for your needs.

Account Management

If you are planning on having multiple users to use the operating system, it's a good idea to have several accounts. This can be accomplished by using the GUI or Terminal with equal effectiveness.

Create or remove a user account via the GUI

To add a user accout:

• Open System Settings from the shell, and click User Accounts.

• Then, click Unlock in the upper right-hand corner, and enter your root password.

• User accounts can be added using the + button in the lower left-hand corner.

To remove a user account:

• Select the user account you want to remove and click on the - (minus) button in the lower left-hand corner.

Create or remove a user account via Terminal

To add a user account, run the following commands with appropriate information:

• sudo adduser -d /home/newuser/ -m newuser

• sudo passwd newuser

• The password you want the user to have

• The same password again.

This would create a new account with the name newuser, and a home directory at /home/newuser. For more information on setting different parameters to your user account (e.g. root privilegies) visit this page.

You can also create a user account by running the following command:

• sudo useradd -c "newuser" -m -s "/bin/bash" newuser

For more information about advanced parameters of the useradd command visit this page.

To remove a user account, run the following command:

• sudo userdel newuser

This will remove the user account newuser from your operating system, but will not delete its home directory. If you want to keep the files of newuser, that’s good, but if you want to delete both the user account and the home directory, run the following command:

• sudo userdel -r newuser