Features
Linux for beginners
Mouse trap
Your mouse won't work in Ubuntu unless you rectify the problem described on the previous page. When the word Grub appears onscreen, Press Escape to display the boot menu. Select the first entry with your cursors keys and press E. Then select the second line and press E again. Type '-- i8042.noloop' (without the quote marks) and press Enter. Press B to start Ubuntu.
Log in with the username and password you created when you installed the operating system. Although the mouse works for now, it won't work once you reboot the computer. To fix this we need to change the boot options permanently. Click on the Applications menu and select Terminal from the Accessories menu. Once you've got a command prompt, type 'sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.1st' (without the quotes). Enter your login password again.
In the notepad-style application that appears, find the first line that starts: kernel/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic. At the end of this line, add '--i8042.noloop' (again, leaving out the quotes).
Before you reboot, you need to set up the sound and networking. To get the sound working properly, go back to the Terminal window and type 'sudo gedit /etc/modules'. In the window that appears, add a new line at the bottom and type 'snd-sb16' (without the quotes). Click Save.
To set up networking, click the System menu and select Network from the Administration menu. Select Wired connection (it will be called this even if you use wireless, due to the way that the virtual machine works) and click Properties. Remove the tick from the Enable roaming mode box and select
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Getting around
With everything working properly, you can start to use Ubuntu as a real operating system. The first thing to note is that it works in a very similar way to Windows. For example, all of Ubuntu's windows and applications have the same three controls for minimising, maximising and closing, and common Windows shortcuts, such as Ctrl-C for copying, work.
The main difference is that there's no Start menu. Instead, you have three menus running across the top of the screen: Applications, Places and System. The Places menu is a bit like My Computer, and is the easiest place to start. Here you'll find options for Computer and several directories, including the Windows-like Documents, Music, Videos and Pictures. Selecting any of these opens an Explorer-style file viewer called File Browser.
Double-clicking a file or folder opens it, right-clicking lets you change a file's properties or create a new folder or file, and clicking Up takes you to the previous directory. You can drag and drop files just as you would in Windows, and everything is very similar. The only slight difference is that there's a dedicated Home button that takes you back to your own personal set of directories. Have a look around the hard disk and you'll find that Linux isn't so different to Windows after all.
Get more applications
The Applications menu provides access to all your installed applications. If you click on this and select Office, you'll see that OpenOffice has already been installed. Select OpenOffice.org Word Processor and you can write documents. This application looks, feels and works in much the same way as Microsoft Word, right down to shortcut keys. You save files in the same way, and the default option is to save files in your Documents folder. You can use the Explorer-style file browser to change the save directory, as you can in Windows, and can even create new folders by clicking Create Folder.
