Hands on: Change your PC's graphical look

There is no doubt that you get a lot of choice with Linux. This follows through to the desktop environment.
While in OS X and Windows you are stuck with whatever Apple or Microsoft gives you, with Linux you can choose your desktop environment.

The two main options are KDE and Gnome, both mature and complete desktops. In the past KDE has proved more popular, offering many more advanced features and a big selection of powerful applications.

However, while the developers have been concentrating on the upcoming KDE4 for some time, the Gnome developers haven’t been idle. Gnome follows a six-month release cycle, each version adding extra features, better performance and more polish.

Of course the balance may change with KDE4’s release and subsequent updates but in the meantime, Gnome is a good choice, particularly for those new to Linux. This month, we’ll look at few of the desktop features offered by Gnome.

Gnome includes most of the applications you need for day-to-day usage: Evolution for email and groupware; Evince, for viewing PDF documents; Ekiga for voiceover IP; Eye of Gnome, for viewing images; and Totem, for video and audio playback; there are many others. Epiphany is included for web browsing. It’s based on Firefox, though the vast majority of people (and distributions) will choose Firefox itself, which integrates well into Gnome but is not part of the Gnome project.

Other third-party applications designed to work well with Gnome are The Gimp (image editing), Pidgin (instant messaging), Inkscape (vector drawing), F-Spot (digital photo manager) and Gnucash (money management).

File management
Nautilus is the Gnome file manager. It lets you do all the things you would expect from a modern file manager, such as dragging files around to move or copy them, renaming and deleting files and changing various properties. Select files in the usual way ­ left-click to select one or drag the mouse to select several; hold the control key to select multiple files by clicking each individually or dragging across areas.

The Nautilus window is divided into two sections. On the left is the side pane, where drives, a directory tree, file history, and others can be viewed. On the right is the main view, where files can be viewed as icons or text. You can collapse and expand the side pane by clicking on the divider or shrink and enlarge it by dragging the divider.

Nautilus displays previews for certain documents, including images and videos, PDF and text files. Providing the correct tools are installed, you can preview audio files by hovering the mouse cursor over the icon ­ moving the pointer away stops the playback. In the latest version of Gnome, images from digital cameras will be previewed in Nautilus with the correct orientation.

Also offered are notes and emblems. Emblems let you mark files or folders with an icon (such as ‘urgent’ or ‘personal’) without modifying the files themselves. Notes act similarly, allowing you to associate a note with a file or folder. To add an emblem, select it in the file’s properties (this works on multiple files), or simply drag the desired emblem from the Emblem side pane to the file. Add or modify a note by going to the file’s properties and typing in the text.

Handling archives
We regularly need to send files to other people. For Windows the most common format is zip and for Unix it is tar, usually compressed with gzip (tar.gz) or bzip2 (tar.bz2). Another less commonly found type is RAR. All these are easily manipulated in Gnome with File Roller. Opening an archive couldn’t be easier ­ just double-click on the file’s icon to access the contents. Extract files by either dragging them from the archive window (again, multiple files can be selected) or click the Extract button and choose which files to extract. For a quick full extraction, just right-click on the file’s icon and select Extract here from the menu.