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Fedora 3 Linux File Management
By Stephen Bucaro
We all know the advantages of the Linux operating system. It's more stable,
more secure, and free of abusive licensing and product activation schemes.
But Linux hasn't taken over as the desktop operating system of choice. That's
because of its reputation as being complicated to install, difficult to use,
and lack of practical applications.
Installing Fedora is as simple as inserting the first CD-ROM into the drive
and rebooting. With the release of the OpenOffice.org office suite, the lack
of practical applications problem is gone. The thing first you need to know
when moving to a new operating system is how to manage files.
In this article, you'll learn that managing files in Linux is just as easy
as iit is with Windows, but without the abusive licensing and product
activation schemes. The version of Linux we'll explore is Fedora 3 , but all
versions of Linux will work similarly.
As with the Windows operating system, with Linux you could use the command
line to manage files. But people don't like using the command line. We'll use
a graphical file manager named Nautilus. Nautilus is the file manager that
comes with the GNOME (pronounced guh-nome) desktop.
There are many other graphical desktops available for Linux - a popular
one being KDE. Many Linux users prefer KDE because it comes with an office suite.
However, the GNOME desktop has now adopted OpenOffice.org as its office suite.
Fedora 3 installs GNOME as the default desktop.
GNOME can't create graphical elements by itself. It sits on top of the
open-source X Window System. The X Window System (X Windows) used by Linux
is maintained by the X.Org Foundation. It's X Windows that draws buttons,
text boxes, dialog boxes, and windows on the computer screen. The Linux
installation program (Anaconda) configures X Windows for your computer, but
if you install a new video card, you may need to reconfigure X Windows.
This article assumes that you have X Windows configured and that you are
using the GNOME desktop. You can launch the Nautilus file manager from the
GNOME task bar. Choose "File Browser" in the "Applications" menu. The file
manager will open the "home" directory if you are logged in as a user, or
the "root" directory if logged in as "root". This article assumes that you
are Logged in as "root".
The navigation window is divided into a left pane and a right pane. In the
right pane you can choose to view files as icons or as a list. If viewing as
icons, to the right of the "Location:" text box you see two magnifier icons
that let you control the size of the icons. I prefer to view files as a list.
To the right of the magnifier icons is a drop-down list that lets you select
to view as list.
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