A little blog for a restless mind

Linux Pics

Davin wants me to post some pics. Since I was also requested to make a few screenshots for the text about Linux I'm writing for a booklet, I thought it would be a good idea to also post the pics here. Perhaps some of you hard-core windoze folks will try out Linux after seeing these pics. A while ago I tried to convince Davin to try out KNOPPIX, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian with the KDE desktop environment that you can run directly from the CD. There's no need to install it on a hard drive or mess around with your hard drive in any way, so all fears you could corrupt your existing setup are groundless. It's also a good way for you to test out GNU/Linux before making the final decision. ;) Anyway, Davin got as far as downloading it, and from then on he chose to ignore it. For months. I think it's more than half a year now. I'm obviously not a good (Linux) advocate. ;)

I have this old machine I bought in March 1998. Everything but the motherboard has since been replaced. :] It's nothing special by today's standards: an AMD K6-3 400MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM, a 9G SCSI system disk, a CD burner, and so on. At the end of December last year I got a new machine, a 2.6GHz P4/800 CPU, 1 GB RAM, a 120 GB disk, a DVD burner, and so on. Nothing special. ;) Since then I've been planning to wipe the disks of the old machine and install a fresh Linux distro. Yesterday I finally got around it and did it. Now it runs Slackware 10.0, and all the screenshots have been made using it.

Let's start. By logging in.

What you see is a login screen as handled by kdm, the KDE's xdm replacement. It's a display manager for the X system that handles graphics in GNU/Linux and UNIX systems in general. The kdm prompts you for the username and password and provides you with a menu of desktop environments you can choose from, which is shown in the picture. This is one of the default screens that show up after booting GNU/Linux, if you configured it to boot into graphics mode (Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, and other more beginner-friendly distros usually do this by default).

The GNOME desktop environment. Displayed are Mozilla (a web browser), obscured is a terminal window with a ftp session, and on top of it is the menu as provided by the default installation.

The KDE desktop environment. In the background you can see KSpread, a spreadsheet application. In the foreground is the menu as provided by the default installation.

And at the end my favourite: The Fluxbox window manager. Well, not exactly, on the other computer I still use fvwm, but only because I'm too lazy to switch over from a window manager I've been using for almost a decade. :] In the background on the right you can see AbiWord in which I'm editing that text on Linux I'm so blabbering about. In the background on the left is XMMS playing music I'm currently listening to. And in the foreground you can see three windows of the GIMP, a tool for drawing images, image composition, photo retouching, and such. I used it to do these screenshots. With a trick: I also used TightVNC to connect to the display of the old machine and could thus do screeshots of even the login screen. ;)

If you're interested, you can download the CDs for some of the most known Linux distributions from the LinuxISO.org site. For a comprehensive list of distributions try DistroWatch. Also, some of the programs mentioned here (Mozilla, GIMP, TightVNC, AbiWord) can also be used in a Microsoft Windows system. And there are plenty more. ;)

posted by AlesS @ 8/15/2004 02:47:00 PM