Where's my...?

Experienced Windows users are normally accustomed to certain functions and/or concepts that are obviously treated differently in GNU/Linux.

Start Menu

This concept remains more or less the same, except it's now called the Mandrake Menu, or main menu, and sits on the bottom left of your screen.

Applications

The wide variety of applications is one large differentiator between GNU/Linux and Windows. Mandrake Linux installs many more applications onto your system, and clicking on the main menu will give you a wide range of choices depending on what you would like to do. There are many full-fledged applications available to accomplish many common tasks such as word processing, e-mail handling, web browsing, etc.

You may also install a large number of applications through the RpmDrake utility (please refer to the Chapter 18, RpmDrake: Package Management).

Control Panel

This is called the Mandrake Control Center and it can be found on the main menu, in the Configuration sub-menu. Through this interface, you will have the ability to modify most of your system's settings with graphical tools.

DOS Shell

GNU/Linux is still very fond of its shell environments. Unlike Windows or MacOS, the popularity of the shell is not fading away. By default, Mandrake Linux installs bash, a truly powerful shell environment. You can access it by clicking the screen icon on the toolbar.

Note

None of your DOS commands/functions will work in a Linux shell. Take a look at Introduction to the Command Line of the Reference Guide to discover their equivalence and much, much more. Have fun, you now have a real shell at hand!

Network Neighborhood

GNU/Linux uses TCP/IP by default, not SMB (the Windows network protocol), so there is nothing like a network neighborhood icon to give you a view of the network you are in. However, you may use the LinNeighborhood application to give you similar functionality.

Konqueror or Nautilus can also accomplish the same task if you already know the name of the server. In the location bar, just type: smb://server_name/, and all the shared Windows resources on that server will appear. Please remember that for this to work, the gnome-vfs-extras and samba-client packages must be installed.

See Section , “File Sharing” for more information.

C: Drive

The “lettered drive” is a concept exclusive to Windows. On UNIX systems, the drive notion (C:, D:, ..., Z:) is replaced by “mount points”. From a user perspective, you are always accessing directories. Your system will use configuration files to instruct the filesystem how to “load” all relevant disks, disk partitions and remote systems, and then assign them to a specified directory, generally under the /mnt/ directory.

These settings are what allow GNU/Linux to be able to read any other filesystem you have configured, even a Windows directory.

CD-ROM Drive

The same concept as for C: applies here. CD-ROMs are “mounted” in /mnt/cdrom/. To access it, just click on the desktop icon. If you have Nautilus running, the CD-ROM will appear in a new window.

Floppy Disk Drive

Like CD-ROMs and disk partitions, floppy disks are mounted and will appear on /mnt/floppy/. This feature directly supports reading Windows diskettes.

Tip

Under KDE, using the Removable media desktop icon will give you access to all your removable media drives: floppy, CD-ROM, ZIP, etc.

My Documents

Under Mandrake Linux every user has a directory called Documents/ located in their home directory.

The “home directory” concept is equivalent to the \winnt\Profiles\user_name\ or \Documents and Settings\user_name\ directories in Windows NT/Windows 2000/Windows XP, and is explained in Chapter 5, Using KDE.

You may also have many files in proprietary formats such as Excel or Word documents. These are usually not a problem to convert. OpenOffice.org is just one application which can import many popular formats for office applications.

Note

We are specifically mentioning office documents because office applications are important. Due to space constraints we cannot enumerate every single Windows application and its GNU/Linux equivalent. However, there is a good probability that you will find GNU/Linux equivalents for all the programs you use under Windows. To get an idea of GNU/Linux equivalents of Windows applications, you can consult this table of equivalents.