Sunday, August 31, 2014

Chapter 4 LFS101x Introduction to Linux - REVIEW

It's a lazy Sunday afternoon in Western New York where I live. I woke up this morning to cloudy grey sky and the most excellent cool breeze blowing through the open windows. Perfect day to do a chapter of the LFS101x Introduction to Linux course.

I'm now on chapter 4 and so far so good.The first 4 chapters have been really basic, but I would highly recommend this course to any new Microsoft to Linux converts out there. A friend however, told me that the course really picks up after chapter 4. I'm gonna start chapter 5 this week.

Anyway the course is really enjoyable, and I had the perfect day to relax and focus on a chapter of it. A big disappointment for me is that the course is very Gnome oriented. I currently enjoy KDE, and don't really plan on switching anytime soon. I've used Gnome till Gnome 3 and then made the switch to KDE and don't think I'll ever look back. 

For me the fact that they use Gnome is not a big deal. I can usually connect the dots and figure out the slight differences between Gnome and KDE. For a new user however this might be problematic, or at the very least, extremely confusing. 

I like the way they broke the labs into Fedora, Debian and Suse sytems. It would of been nice if they were a little more diverse with the desktop environment. For instance, maybe Gnome, KDE and XFCE.  Or at least use KDE with the openSuse lab seeing its the default desktop for that distribution. One reason I've been thinking about making the move to openSuse. Anyway, that's my only complaint about the course so far. They should of used a couple different desktops besides just Gnome. 

So chapter 4 covers the Gnome desktop. Topics include logging in, changing users, putting the computer into sleep mode, and screen locking. Something new I learned today is that you can lock the screen using ctrl-alt-l . Walk away from your computer, lock screen, use root password to log back in. This comes in handy if you have to step away from your computer and you're in a room full of people you may not entirely trust. Unfortunately in my world this happens more than I'd like to admit ;-)

The chapter also gets into a little customization and shows you how to change your desktop background, and change your computer theme. 

Chapter 4 also covers basic operations. Launching programs, getting around Nautilus (Dolphin if you use KDE), finding drives, usb, cdroms, etc. 


Finally, there was a little about using Gedit to edit a file, deleting files, and recovering files. All fairly basic straight forward stuff. 

I'll be starting Chapter 5 next week sometime. I'm not sure if I'm going to review each chapter but I may cover some of the interesting points covered in each chapter I read. 

Thanks for reading and if you want to find out about signing up for the course, check out my previous post with the sign up link here.

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