Hello, this is Alan Pope with the seventh screencast
in the Ubuntu Month of Screencasts.
All of the screencasts in this month can be downloaded for free
from our website, which is screencasts.ubuntu.com
In this screencast we are going to look at some of the applications,
that are installed by default with an Ubuntu installation.
Now I am using the very latest version of Ubuntu,
so some things might look a little bit different to your install.
First application we are going to look at here is the text editor
and in the text editor we can edit multiple text documents.
It has some standard features like search and replace,
it also has syntax highlighting, if you are a programmer that's very useful.
It also has a spellchecker and when you go to close the text editor,
it will prompt you to save all of the documents you have open, which is quite a useful feature.
Other applications that are under the Accessories menu,
include the Disk Usage Analyzer and the Screenshot tool.
We will use these two together.
The Disk Usage Analyzer, if I just click Scan Home,
will go through all of the folders in my home directory
determining how much volume of data is in each folder
and then produce a nice little diagram over on the right hand side,
showing proportionately how much space in my home directory is taken up.
So we can see here, the largest chunk of space is taken up
with some music that is in my home directory.
You can drill down on these folders
and as you hover over a folder it tells you how much space there is.
You can also double-click on the menu, the tree on the left-hand side to navigate around.
And the list is sorted by most data in a folder at the top, largest at the top.
So let's take a screenshot of this, because it looks quite neat.
If we grab a whole desktop and hit take screenshot
then we get a picture which includes the desktop background, the panel and so on
and we'll save that on the desktop.
That might not be what you are after, you might just want a screenshot of one application.
So let us take another screenshot, but this time choose Grab the current window
and add a delay of three seconds.
We'll also add a drop shadow border around the picture to make it look nice.
It looks especially nice if you put it in a web based documentation
or put the picture in a word document or something like that.
So we'll save this
and now we have got another image on our desktop.
If we double-click the first one, you can see that it covers the whole desktop
and the second one is just a screenshot of the application, with this funky little border.
You can't really see the drop shadow border.
So what I'll do is just show you...
If I open up a web browser.
So I find Firefox, the web browser, which we'll come back to a little bit later.
And by default it shows us some documentation, local documentation on my machine.
If I move this out of the way and just drag the image in to the browser,
you can see there the nice funky drop shadow around the picture,
which makes it look rather nice in documentation.
So that's the Disk Usage Analyzer and the Screenshot tool.
There's also another neat tool under accessories called Tomboy.
Now Tomboy is a note taking application, it's sometimes thought of as a small wiki.
A local wiki.
Here it lists all of the documents we have already created.
and there's a couple created and delivered with Tomboy.
Up here we have a panel icon, where I can create new notes.
I can give my notes a title and then put some content in.
There's some basic text formatting in here, like bullet points, underline and so on.
And we can change the size of the text as well and highlight it too.
The nice thing about Tomboy is it provides very quick access to
documents and it saves straight away,
so you don't have to save your documents, as soon as you edit them, they become saved.
We can also link one document to another.
There are a few ways to do this, I'll just do it by clicking the link button.
It's now created an extra document,
a Tomboy note and in here I can make further notes
and the two are now linked together.
So now you can see in my list of all notes, I have got multiple documents.
You can also see by clicking on the panel icon.
Here is my list of documents and if you push the little push pin
then it makes a document stay in that list permanently,
no matter how many documents you have.
We also have a Dictionary application under the accessories menu.
So here we can just type in a word and we will get a dictionary definition.
Pretty basic, but also there is a little sidebar,
where we can get similar words and a few other features as well.
Very useful if like me you can't spell.
There is also a Character Map.
Now this is useful if you want to put any characters in to a document,
that you don't have on your keyboard or it's not easy to get on your keyboard.
So if we choose to view by Unicode blocks, say I want a Greek symbol,
I can choose Greek and over here if I want the Delta symbol,
if I just double-click it, then it appears down the bottom and gives me a description.
If I hit the copy button, I can then go to some other document,
like for example my ToDoList and do a right-click, paste
and there's the Delta character.
So you can pick any character out of there or multiple characters out of the character map
and copy and paste them in to documents elsewhere.
There's also a neat search tool called Tracker.
There's a daemon that runs in the background that indexes your files
and this tracker search tool allows us to search for files that have been indexed.
So here's all of the files with bots in their name
and we can filter this to show only folders or all files or different types of files.
So these are all the music files.
And down the bottom you get a little summary of the file as well
and in some cases you also get a preview.
There's also a rather extensive calculator,
which can be made a little bit more basic as well.
There's not really much to say about a calculator, that I am sure you probably don't already know.
So I'm not going to say anything else about a calculator.
Let's move on to the next menu under applications, which is Games.
Now you can see there are quite a few games, I'll just show you a couple of them.
Four-in-a-Row, I'll play red and I'm absolutely rubbish at this,
so no doubt the computer will beat me.
Yes, there we go.
So yeah, he got four in a row, often known as Connect 4.
What other games have we got?
We've got Chess, ah, now this is really cool.
The chess you can either view in two dimensions, like this
or there's a 3D version of it as well.
And if a start a new game I can either play against another human
or I can play against the computer.
If I start the game,
I can make my first move
and then the computer will make it's first move.
And if I don't want to continue playing right now
I can just close it and it will save my progress.
And then if I go and open the Chess program again,
it carries on from where it left off, which is quite a neat feature,
given how long Chess games tend to be.
Another feature of some of the games
including this one, Nibbles, is network play.
You can play on-line against other people.
So under the game menu, if I choose New, it plays locally,
if I choose Network Game, then I can play against other people on-line.
And there's some settings here for what server you connect to.
And We can see here I am connected to a server.
It shows who is on-line, what rooms there are and what tables are available.
If a try and join a table that has already got all the places filled,
then I get an error message and
you can see those two people are probably playing against each other at that table.
There's a preferences dialog, where you can make changes to some of the settings
and determine which server you connect to.
It's pretty straight forward.
I managed to connect and lose at Nibbles earlier on today.
Another neat game is Sudoku.
So if you are a Sudoku fan, this is a very good way to pass a large amount of time.
Pretty standard, you can highlight a box
and fill in the number that you think should be in the box.
There's a nice highlighter that shows all of the
horizontal, vertical and the box of nine
around the number you are currently looking at.
You can also put guesses in the boxes
and there's a hint system as well
and you can get it to just fill in the answer for you, if you are really stuck.
You can also print out the Sudoku puzzle or puzzles,
if you want to do them on paper rather than the computer screen.
So there's quite a few games there to play with.
Plenty of things to pass the time.
Let's move on to the next menu.
The next one is Graphics.
Now the first one we use is the gThumb Image Viewer.
Now I have downloaded some photos from my digital camera to a folder called temp_pics.
And here you can see I have got seven photos,
and if I just double-click them, it is very quick and easy to view them.
I can show a little slide show of the pictures and that works quite nicely.
So it's a nice little basic application for viewing your photos.
There's a more comprehension photo management program,
which is F-Spot, also under the same menu.
And with F-Spot we can import photos,
so if I import them, I can import them from a folder,
but I can also import them directly from my digital camera.
So I am going to import photos from the temp_pics folder,
which are the photos that I have already dragged off of my digital camera,
just to save time.
And here you can see it's loading the pictures,
I can tag them and I can also get it to copy the photos to a photos folder.
So if I was copying them off of my digital camera, I could do that.
You can tag your photos by dragging the tags over the photos.
So those are my favorite pictures in that collection.
Which is neat, because when you double-click the tag,
it filters out all those that do not have the tag.
So it's only showing my favorites right now.
There's a time-line across the top, so that you can see
how many photos you took at various points and
you can change the size of the thumbnails as well.
So you can view more or less images at once.
There's also a slide show feature, you can view them full screen
and you can also open the images with external tools, such as the GIMP Image editor,
which is an Image manipulation tool.
You can also export the photos to on-line galleries or export them to a CD
or just dump them out to a folder.
It's a very useful way of getting your photos out of your photo management suite
and into form that you can maybe give to other people,
either an on-line gallery or a CD.
So I mentioned the GIMP Image Editor.
This is a very comprehensive image manipulation tool.
I am by no means an expert on this at all.
Having very little artistic talent at all.
If we go and open an image though.
I'll grab one of the photos that we imported in to F-Spot.
We imported them to the photos folder
and you can see there, it sorts them by date, by default.
So here are some image in one folder, that were taken on one particular day
and there is some images that were taken on another day.
And if I open one of these images up,
It's a very comprehensive package and you can see there's plenty of features
and options for manipulating the image.
I'm not going to do anything with it though.
So that's the Graphics menu.
Let's have a look at the next menu on the list, which is Internet.
So the first thing we'll look at is the Pidgin Instant Messenger,
also previously known as GAIM.
Now Pidgin allow you to connect to instant messaging systems,
like Yahoo!, IRC, AOL, MSN and so on.
If I fill in my MSN credentials here,
then Pidgin will connect to the MSN network.
and I'll be able to chat with my on-line buddies on MSN.
You can set a buddy icon if you have got a photo that you want to use.
You can set that, I have not got one on this machine,
so I'll just use the default and save that.
As soon as you save, it will try and connect.
And depending on the messaging system it might pull down a list of your buddies.
So let's double-click one of my friends
and see if we can have a quick conversation with him.
So you type in the box at the bottom
and their response is time stamped at the top of the screen.
You can talk to multiple people at once,
you can invite multiple people into conversations,
you can send files to people, you can receive files from people,
it works much much the same as any other
instant messaging system really.
You can log your conversations to disk,
so that in the event that you want to go back and recall what was said,
you can do that.
It seems to work quite well.
One thing that Pidgin currently doesn't support is web cams,
there are other instant messaging tools that do support web cams,
but this one doesn't at the moment.
You can see I have now got an icon in the panel up here, which shows my status.
If I right-click that, I can choose to change my status.
There we go, so I'm now away.
Another friend pops up and says hello.
If I was talking to multiple people, multiple different individuals
then you'd get multiple tabs appearing in this window.
So you just end up with one window,
you don't end up with lots of windows cluttering up your desktop,
which is quite a useful feature.
There are also plug-ins available for Pidgin,
for additional functions.
My personal favorite is the one that gives you a premonition when someone is going to talk to you.
It's good for scaring people.
Another application that's installed by default,
we have already seen briefly, is the Firefox web browser.
I'll just go through a few neat features of Firefox.
If we just navigate to the screencasts website,
screencasts.ubuntu.com
It works much the same as any other web browser,
but of course Firefox has this concept of tabbed browsing.
as a few other browser do like Opera, Mozilla and Safari do.
So we can switch between these tabs and have multiple tabs open at once.
which is a very useful feature.
I find it's very difficult to go back to non-tabbed browser after this.
We have a configurable search box in the top right-hand corner,
which by default uses Google as the search engine of choice,
but you can change that with the little drop down on the top right.
And Firefox also has the concept of Add-ons.
Now there's two options here in the very latest version of Ubuntu.
You can choose to get extensions from the Mozilla website
or get Ubuntu Add-ons
What that means is it will use the Ubuntu package management system
to install add add-ons, they're delivered by Ubuntu.
The benefit of this is the extensions are available for anyone who uses this computer.
So if I install the them once, any of these extensions,
they're available for anyone else.
So I get a list of extensions and you get a description down the bottom.
there's a fair few there.
All I've got to do if I want to install is just tick the box.
Now it's going to ask me, when I hit Apply, for my password.
The reason for this is I'm making a change to the system.
I'm not making a personal change, I'm making a change to the whole computer.
So therefore I have to have administrative rights to be able to do that.
And asking me for my password is one way of confirming
that I have the necessary privileges.
So it's now downloading and installing that extension.
But as I say, this is one way to install add-ons or extensions to Firefox.
The other way is to hit the Get Extensions button
or just follow the link on a website to download extensions.
You can see here we go to the Mozilla webpage,
where there are many extensions that we could install.
But if we install by this method, then they're only usable by me, my user ID.
Each individual person using this computer
would have to install there own extensions, if we decided to go that route.
But there are of course many more extensions available
via that route than there are through the official Ubuntu get extensions method.
So now it's finished installing the extensions.
So what I'll do is I'll close the browser
and when I open the browser up we should see a slight difference
in the bottom right hand corner,
we should see a little link that says that adblock is enabled.
So there we can see the adblock add-on or extension has been installed
and we can confirm that by going to Tools, Add-ons
and you can see there's the adblock add-on.
We can also configure themes and language packs through this same interface.
So that's a little bit about Firefox
Let's take a look at the next application, Evolution Email.
Evolution is an email client, but it's also able to manage your contacts,
tasks, to do list, that kind of stuff.
The first time you open Evolution it asks you for some details,
so I am going to fill in my email address.
This is just a temporary email address I'm using for this screencast.
And it asks you what kind of mail server.
Now this information would come from your Internet Service Provider,
your administrator or from the people who provide your email.
So I fill in all of the necessary details that access my email.
And also fill in the details for being able to send email.
And that's all done.
Now I just tell it what time zone I live in, which is in London.
And Evolution starts up and it wants to connect, to download my email.
So I give it my password.
And Over on the left hand side you can see a list of folders
and there we can see I have received an email.
You also get a flashing icon on the panel at the top of the screen
Which is useful if you've got your email minimized,
you might not notice so have that little icon flash,
which goes away when you click it,
gives you an indication that you have got some new mail.
If I click the mail, oh it's a mail from me.
I don't normally send myself emails like this,
it's just for demo.
So Evolution also has a contact system, calendar, memo and so on.
So we could add this person to our address book,
just by right-clicking and add to address book, simple as that.
And if I go to my contacts,
you can see that person now shows up in my contacts list.
If we go back to the email, we can reply to that,
because it was sent on the seventh of September, this is a little bit out of date.
So what we will do is reply,
and reply to the person and say some appropriate reply.
This text is quite small, I can make it larger if I hold down Ctrl, Shift and hit + a couple of times.
It'll make the text larger and that's a standard in many applications,
if you do that in Firefox it makes the text larger, Ctrl, Shift, +
So now I've sent a reply, it goes to my outbox
and after a little while it should send
and there we go, it's gone... hopefully.
And there's also a calendar feature, so once they reply I can fill in a date,
when I'm going to go out with that person for a drink.
And we can also have a memo system for making notes
and a task system for noting tasks.
That's a brief introduction to Evolution.
Obviously it is a very comprehensive package
and we don't really have time to give it justice right now.
We'll have a separate screencast about that another time.
The last application we'll look at under the Internet menu is Ekiga Softphone,
used to be know as Gnome-meeting
And it's a voice over IP type client.
So I can call another person,
I can call another person using a web cam, on-line.
You can also configure Ekiga to connect through third party gateways.
So I can set up an account with a third party
and I'll just show you a company that I've used.
Sipgate, which provide me with a land line phone number,
so people can phone me on a particular phone number
and my Ekiga will ring if someone phones me on that number.
And I can talk to them through my computer with a headset,
microphone and headphones.
And you can dial numbers and use SIP,
which is an open protocol as well.
If I close Ekiga. we can see we get a little icon in the panel.
So it sits there waiting for inbound calls.
Let's move on to the Office menu
and we have got the OpenOffice.org word processor,
Again the version of software on here might be slightly different to you,
because I'm using the very latest version of Ubuntu.
7.10, which comes out in October.
Now this looks very much like any other word processor,
you may be familiar with, all of the standard buttons and menus
and if we go and open a file, we can open a text document.
Here's some example text documents here.
Notice we support ODT open document format
and Word documents as well.
So this is a Word format document and we can open that up.
Looks pretty good.
Now again Open Office is a massive package and we don't have time
to go into it in full detail here.
But we can also open spreadsheets.
So it has got a fully featured spreadsheet application.
Just as you would expect in any office package.
If we open a spreadsheet, you can see
this supports spreadsheet files,
which could be ODS open spreadsheet format.
and also XLS, Excel spreadsheets.
So you can open Excel spreadsheets in Open Office as well.
That all looks pretty good.
The third application in Open Office is Open Office Presentation,
which is the equivalent of Microsoft PowerPoint in Microsoft Office.
So we have a little wizard here, where we can create empty presentations,
or use a template and there's a few templates supplied.
or we can go off and open an existing presentation.
Let's have a look again at the example content and look for presentations.
Notice it also opens Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
If we open up this presentation you can see
multiple slides, works much the same way as
any other presentation software.
Here is our slide sorter and if we run the slide show.
There we go, we get our slides one after the other,
Click the mouse and it moves on to the next slide.
As I say, we'll have another screencast about Open Office,
because it's a very big application.
The final Open Office application is a relatively new one in the history of Open Office.
And It's kind of the equivalent of Microsoft Access in Microsoft Office.
And here we can create a database
and it should be fairly familiar for users of Microsoft Access.
We create our database using a little database wizard.
And then we have the standard tables, queries, forms and reports
and we have further wizards in here, where we can create
our new database for storing whatever we need to store.
Cool!
The next menu under applications...
Ooh! Actually, going back to the example content,
if we have a look in our home directory, there's a folder,
which is actually a link to folder elsewhere, called examples.
In here is where you'll find all of that example content.
If you just double-click the files, it should open with the relevant
Open Office application.
There we go, this is a document about the example content.
Now you notice the documents in there are read only.
because they actually reside in an area of the disk that you don't have rights to change.
So if you want to change any of them, copy them to your home directory and then change them.
The last menu is Sound & Video
So let's take a look at Sound Juicer CD Extractor.
Now I've just inserted a CD in my machine.
A rather funky Kylie Minogue CD.
and Sound Juicer picked up the names of the tracks on-line
and I can just play the tracks now.
Now you won't hear the audio because obviously I don't want to
violate the copyright of Kylie Minogue or her record company,
but it is playing right now.
I can also extract to disk,
if it's allowed in my country.
And I can extract using various formats.
We can change these formats
and add additional formats by hitting the Edit Profiles button.
So if you want to rip the CD to MP3
or whatever other format you want to, you can do.
And all we do is hit the extract button
and it will extract those tracks.
If any of the track names are wrong,
you can just highlight them and change them.
And once you change them,
under the Disk menu there's an option to submit the track names back on-line
to the on-line database.
Simple as that.
So you can use it as a music player or CD player
or you can use it to extract the audio.
Now once you have extracted the audio on to your hard disk,
you might then want to burn a duplicate CD.
Again if you're legally allowed to do that.
And Serpentine is a tool that can do that.
So here we have a blank CD
of whatever size our CD is.
And to add tracks, we just hit the Add button
and go and find some music.
So, I downloaded this album from the Internet, The Bots.
And if I want to burn it to a CD, I can just select all of the tracks,
if I hold down Shift and click the last track it selects all of them.
Then hit open and it adds them all into my CD.
Once I've finished sorting them into the order I want
and adding tracks and making my CD perfect.
I just hit Write to Disk, chunk in a blank CD
and it will burn those tracks as an audio CD.
I can then clear that and create another audio CD very easily.
So I said that you could play tracks using Sound Juicer,
you can also play tracks using the Movie Player.
This is Totem Movie Player,
which normally you might use to play video,
but let's go and find a video in the example content.
there's a Nelson Mandela video,
the infamous Nelson Mandela video.
And we can also go and get some music from my music folder.
again there's the tracks I downloaded from the Internet.
And I just dragged that folder in to the play-list
and after it's finished playing the video, it will move on to play the audio tracks.
So Totem is a very comprehensive video and audio playback tool.
We'll talk more about that in a further screencast,
because there's a lot to talk about with video playback.
The final application under Sound and Video is Rhythmbox.
Rhythmbox is very similar to iTunes
and other audio playback and audio management suites.
We can import a folder of music.
So let's go and find that music I downloaded.
Now in fact the tags, meta data tags inside this audio
is not done, so actually shows the artist as unknown.
That's my fault, if I'd have tagged these files correctly then
the artist, genre and album would be correct.
and if you download music often, it really is correct anyway.
Rhythmbox also supports podcasts
So if you have a particular podcast that you listen to,
then you can add that feed into Rhythmbox
and it will download the podcast to your local disk.
So if we go on-line and find a podcast to download,
LugRadio is a podcast I listen to, sometimes.
And if we go to their website, many podcasts have a feed link.
So if you copy that link,
and click the New Podcast Feed
and paste the feed in to Rhythmbox.
You can see it shows the latest episodes and has started downloading them.
When you want to tell it to download again, you hit the Update All Feeds button
and it starts downloading the latest episodes.
Rhythmbox can also play on-line radio stations,
if you want to add radio stations, you click the New Internet Radio Stations button.
And also supports a couple of on-line music systems.
One is called Jamendo.
Jamendo is a very neat website, where you can listen to music for free
and then choose to download the albums.
and it downloads using Bit Torrent,
the common peer-to-peer file-sharing system,
to download legal content.
So the content that's in Jamendo is provided legally
with the copyright owners consent.
So you can see here, two and a half thousand artists,
four and a half thousand albums there
and you just find them based on genre or the artist.
Highlight the album and just start playing it
and you can listen to it on-line or you can download the album.
Another option is Magnatune.
Magnatune's similar in that you can search for music
and play the music directly through Rhythmbox.
But you can also buy the tracks.
So for example I bought an album by The Bots,
by simply listening to it, I liked the music so I then
clicked the purchase album and bought the album.
And you can choose how much you give the artist for the music,
it's a very good service.
You can also create play-lists in Rhythmbox,
it's a pretty neat audio application.
We'll talk more about that in a further screencast.
Now under the Places menu and the System menu,
there are many other applications installed,
but I'm going to save that for another screencast.
Thanks for watching.
All of our screencasts are available from our website,
which is screencasts.ubuntu.com