CompTIA Linux+ XK0-005 – Unit 04 – System Administration Part 4

65. xvidtune

Again, other settings that you might deal with as far as the Xvid Tune Utility, opening it up gives you the ability to kind of work with the display. Again, we talk about the resolution and the sync start and the moving things as far as horizontally or vertically to adjust those screens. All of these are the finetuning capabilities that you have available to you. And again, this is an example of the Gnome desktop environment. I’m not saying you don’t have this with everybody else, but we’re just seeing and focusing on a very common, prevalent desktop environment and how you can play with all of the finetuned settings about your video.

66. Screensaver

Well, what else would we need with a desktop environment but a screen saver? So if you have some screen savers that you like, or if you want to use some of the ones that exist already, then you can make those changes as well. What do you get with a screen saver? How long of idle time until I turn it on? Is it going to be active for so long? Basically it’s going to be turned on. And for how long does it have to be idle? Do I want lock things? All of those settings are there. And I will tell you this linux has some pretty cool screen savers. I think you’ll like them. At least look at them and play with them. It will be a good waste of an hour of your time, but it is a lot of fun.

67. Appearance Preferences

The appearances, the themes, the backgrounds, font, information, all of those, just like you’re used to in the Windows environment, are there for you as well. You can change the background colors, the things that you might call wallpaper. You can change or work with existing themes you can find themes you can download and new backgrounds that you can download just like any other system. Again, take a look at it. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised about some of the options you have, but this is all eye candy things that make, hopefully, your experience in working a lot easier. Personally, I don’t like the wild craziness because it helps me lose focus of the icons and what I’m working on. I like the solid colors, the light colors that don’t cause me a headache. But you’ve got your choice.

68. Demo – Configuring Video Settings

Well, I thought giving you a chance to look at the KDE again would be a nice way to make a break from all of the Gnome desktop environments. And this is about configuring the GUI and I don’t know, I kind of like this cool little backtrack ammon, I suppose. Anyway, we’re going to use the GUI to configure the GUI. I like that. I’m going to rightclick anywhere in the blank area of the desktop up and click on configure Desktop. And here I have pretty much all of the stuff that I want to use. Now I am of course using a picture, this backtrack picture, but I could have said no picture if I didn’t want or whatever I had as an option. I could even try to deal with colors, which I don’t know how that’s going to work with this particular picture, but anyway, I won’t play too much with that.

One of the things we wanted to get to was the display. And on the display was to show you that you can make changes to things like the F screen size or to the refresh rate. The refresh rate is something that people claim if they don’t have it set up just right, it’s going to cause them some headaches. But you can make all those changes. Click on Apply and including again this multiple desktop options, how many desktops you want to be able to provide them. You can see a little slider bar at the top that I can use. I’m going to go ahead and cancel without changing any of those settings but just to make sure you understood that you have some of those options to you just like you would in any graphical environment.

Now I’ve just moved here into the command shell and another thing I can type is Xvid Tune, Oops Tune and that brings up another display. It’s even giving me a warning I got to click on and deal with that allows me to again work on some of the same settings that I’ve had before. Now in this particular case, I don’t see under Xvid Tune any options there for the screen savers, but I can certainly change a lot of the displays, the verticals, the up down, pixel clocks and everything else. So I have a lot of options here as well as I have many other types of settings.

But a lot of you probably are going to prove or approve of using the configured desktop a little bit better, especially because it does add things like the screen saver or choosing random and then testing the random screen savers. Okay, well that wasn’t too exciting. We’ll bring it back. I was hoping I could see something really fancy with the random, but anyway, it’s an easy straightforward click Apply. If you like your changes, click OK and you can make this work for you. If you don’t like this dark color, you can make it lighter. All of those features. Just like you have almost any actual operating system that gives you a desktop or a Gui to work with.

69. Mouse Preferences

Another issue we have with the graphical user interface is this little pointer device called the mouse. So if you don’t like the way the mouse works, guess what? You can make the change. Now, if you didn’t know this already, all mice are ambidextrous. You can make a righthanded mouse or a lefthanded mouse. Now, most often, lefthanded people leave it set up as a righthanded mouse. It’s just as a righthander. We’re used to saying click means your index finger. They just have to remember it’s not their index finger if they’re left handed, but if you switch them, then their index finger of the left handed person becomes the regular click, not the alternate click button. See, I can’t even call it right clicking because that’s a right handed bias over the left handed side.

So alternate click, click, whatever you want to use, you can change it. You can change the speed of the pointer moving back and forth across the screen. You want to know, does I have to take the whole mouse pad to move to the top, or can I just move my mouse an inch on the mouse pad? In fact, I remember many, many years ago, I was teaching a class on routing and I had a user in the class who had never apparently worked with a mouse before and said when I said, you need to. Open up a hyper terminal to connect to the router. Started trying to move the mouse through the programs menu on Windows and said, hey, my mouse is stuck. Because what happened? The mouse got to the top of the mouse pad and they needed to go further to get to the programs thing.

They didn’t know you could pick the mouse up and then move it up some more. And so they said it was broken. And I went over there and showed them how that worked and they said, wow, if I had only known, because I had four mouse pads at work taped together so I have enough room for my whole screen. Okay, if you don’t want to go through that, then you can go through the change of the pointer speed. So you can use just a single mousepad and cover the whole screen and you won’t get stuck. How’s that? True story, by the way. It was back in the late 90s, so mics, remember, haven’t always been around forever. They were new creatures in one point.

70. Keyboard Preferences

Even your keyboard preferences. The display of the keyboard, the speed. So what do we mean by that? Well, let’s say you want to do a repeat letter. You want, like, a dash to go across the screen in your document you’re creating. How long do you have to hold that little dash button down before it realizes you actually mean repeat the thing across? And if it does repeat it across, how quickly do you want it to go? Do you want the cursor to blink when it’s of where it’s located at? Most of us do, because it lets us know where we can start typing, rather than it just being a surprise when you start hitting the first letters and you say, oh, I’m down here, I’m not up here.

So you change those settings again, the layouts, accessibilities, mouse keys if you need them, special keys. Some of you might even go with this other format, other than the querti format. I know I’m going to butcher the name, the Dravor Jack or something like that layout where it’s apparently much, ergonomically, better for your hands to use that and apparently also speeds up your typing. I’ve played with it, but then I had to rearrange all the keys. So, anyway, you can change those for those of you who are really into those different types of changes. You have that on your keyboard. Our preference.

71. Demo – Configuring the Mouse and Keyboard

We’re going to quickly show you how you can work with the mouse and the keyboard, just a little bit, if you’d like. And we’re going to do some of our settings under System and under Preferences. And we’ll start off with the mouse. All right. Right or lefthanded mouse? Well, really that just matters. The idea of which is the click button for most of us writeies, that’s our index finger. But if you’re a lefthanded person, you want to use your index finger for the click, then you make it left handed. If I want to show the position of the pointer when the control key is pressed, that means that if you lost it somewhere, see, if you couldn’t see the mouse for whatever reason, I hit the control button and then I can see it now.

I kind of like the fast pointer speed because now I barely have to move my hand on the pad to get this thing to go. I like that I don’t even have to leave the mouse pad. Or I can make it painfully obvious that I’m having to get carpal tunnel by slowing it down. Drag and drop as far as the threshold area of what I’m grabbing on, and double click. See, I can turn on and turn off the light bulb, but if I want to make it a short duration, see, I just double clicked, but I’m not fast enough to turn on the light bulb. All right, I don’t even know if you can hear me trying to click, but you can make it. So you have to be like a superhero fast to be able to turn that on and off. Or look at this, I can make it really long. Click.

There we go. Click, click. I mean, that’s all the more it takes to do those double clicks. All right, let’s close that little thing down. Let’s go to our system preferences. We can play with our keyboard again. The delay key presses repeat when the key is held down. In other words, if I rest my notebook on the keyboard, how long until it starts repeating that letter over and over and over again, or however else you want to set that up? Same with the speed. Once you do hold the key down, how quickly will it go? So let’s take a look at this. I’m going to click in here. I’m going to hold the letter A down, and you see how fast it kind of goes across. Same with the backspace key, by the way. So let’s make the delay for the A. Really short click in here.

And you see, I just barely touched the A and it already was on its way. Let’s make it a little longer and let’s make it go fast when I do repeat. So now I’m going to hold the A down. It took a while for it to start, but when it did, boy, watch that thing. It just took off. There we go. All right. It’s just fun stuff to play with. Okay. I don’t think I like those settings for me personally, so let’s kind of put it back where it was. Layouts again, the type of keyboard. You can choose models, you can choose vendors. Just because you don’t see yours in here doesn’t mean there isn’t one that you couldn’t use in setting this up. It’s all up to you. If I’m going to hit cancel, you can make those options as you need to. Layout is in the USA standard. We have different country capabilities here.

Well, I don’t mind the USA standard. Let’s see if I can hit the letter U and get there a little quicker. Speed it up with the mouse track ball here. There we go. United States. That’s the one. I already had the variance under the US. There we go. Divorac or divorgeac or however you put that in there when I click on that. And what you’ll see, if you really look carefully, is look at this. I don’t know how well you can see this, but it’s now A-O-E-U-I. All the vowels are one side. The most common consonants are on the other side. It makes your life really, once you get used to it, so much faster in typing, and apparently does limit the repetitive injury options that you have when you’re typing. Anyway, I’m going to cancel that.

Now that I’ve gone out there and done my little plug, I still use a querie keyboard because that’s what everybody has anyway. So you can make all those changes as well to affect the operating system, including the layout. I travel enough that the little keyboard layout with different countries like the UK and Germany drive me crazy because they use an American keyboard, but they have it with those other styles. And so the keys are all messed up on some of the special functions, but you just change it around when you’re working on your own.

72. Stop and Start X Windows

All right, as I said, with older versions of Linux, you might not start automatically with the actual GUI environment. Most every system, it’s easily started by typing Start x, meaning Start x windows. And of course, if you’re done with it and you want to turn it off, then you would normally go and turn it off with a stop command. Now, it’s not necessarily stop x, although some versions might give that to you. But if you go to the Etsy directory under the initd the initialization, I like to call it the initd, most people call it but it’s under the initializationgdm, then the word stop.

What you’re basically saying is I want to turn off the desktop management and get it to basically go away. As I said, some might let you do stop x as well. Now, to turn this off, you have to be the root or you have to use the sudo command to be able to change or add the root authentication in there. So you can make that kind of a change. But it’s basically turning off the windows. Now, most people, if they have it running, they don’t care to turn it off because they can bring up shells all day long inside that environment. So Start x is what you probably need to remember to bring or turn on your desktop environment.

73. Demo – Stopping and Starting X Windows

All right, we’re going to take a look at whether or not we can shut down this GUI. So I’m going to open up a root terminal. We’ll open up a regular terminal. We’ll just use the pseudo command. Now, remember, this option is going to be different with each distribution because the daemon in which they’re using under the initialized Damon here, the init might be different in its name that they’re going to use to stop things. But this is the Gnome desktop manager GDM. And I’m going to issue a stop command. And oop, there it goes. It says, hey, I need the password.

And there’s the password.And look at that, already stopped. Now, of course, I have to log back in as my user account to get even the chance to turn on my graphical display, which on almost every version of Linux is called Start X. For StartX. Windows. Hit enter. And here comes the beautiful graphics. Once we get past that really isore checkerboard stuff that you’re seeing. And in just a minute, just there we go, is my GUI. So it was just just that easy to turn it off. To turn it on.

74. Unit 04 Review

All right, so this unit covered a lot of ground. We looked at two of the three A’s in the AAA the authentication, the authorization, and the accounting. I promised you we would talk about logging that’s going to come up in another unit. Now, the authentication was basically the users. We talked about creating and managing your users and your groups. The authorization was permission. So we looked at the types of permissions you can give to files and directories, and we talked about special permissions as well. Then we looked at environmental variables that you would be using, some of which might define your home directory or the shell program that you’re using. Others may be variables that you change or need to use, depending on what your goals are, the circumstances, the scripting that you’re doing.

And then we talked about the GUI environment, at least how to enhance it, the resolution, the refresh rate, backgrounds, screen savers, mouse speeds, keyboard layouts, things that make your work environment basically work for you. And those, technically, are also environmental variables that you would be setting up. So that was kind of the goal here, was making your Linux operating system more useful for you, making it more secure, making sure every user has their own account, dealing with permissions. And we’ll continue to go through Linux and add and add and add to our foundation and our knowledge base of what you can do. I hope so far you’ve seen what I’ve said to be true, that I don’t care which version of Linux you’re using. These commands, these things that we’re dealing with are in common with all of those different distributions.