Introducing X
Here is a very basic introduction to the features of the default X
desktop on Ricardo. [full-screen shot]
You may also wish to take a look at the page describing
X access to ac.
< Icons
On the left of the X screen there are a few icons
for commonly used programs. Reading from the top: the editors
icon pops up a choice of two powerful editors, GNU emacs
and Nedit; "xterms" pops up a choice of an (additional) X
terminal on ricardo, a telnet connection to ac, or the library
catalog; "math" offers a selection of mathematical and
statistical programs; "manuals" opens up the
"tkman" program which gives you access to the full set of
manual pages for programs on Ricardo; and "exit" gives you
the options of exiting, restarting the X session manager, or
refreshing the X screen. To activate these icons, click just
ONCE (double-clicking will
open more than one copy of the program, which could get
confusing).
Menus >
If you move the mouse pointer onto an empty area of
the X desktop and press the left mouse button, you'll see a
drop-down menu (a bit like the Windows 95 Start menu). If
you drag down onto any one of the first group of
entries you will activate the corresponding program. If
you drag further, onto one of the areas in the main menu
marked with a right arrow, you will pop up a sub-menu of
additional programs.
Navigation
When the mouse pointer is over a blank bit of
desktop, pressing the right button will pop up a list of
applications that are currently running. You can switch
the focus to any of these by dragging onto its entry in the
list then releasing the right button.
Getting out of X
To exit altogether, click the Exit button and select "Yes, Really
Quit". Note also that when you have an X
session running you have various options for flipping between that session
and your regular Windows programs. You can hold down the Alt key and
press the Tab key (repeatedly if need be). This will cycle through the
list of Windows programs currently running, including Exceed: "let go"
when you see the icon representing the program you want to return to.
Alternatively, move the mouse pointer to the top right-hand corner of the
X desktop and press the "-" button. This will shrink your X session
to an icon on the Windows 95 taskbar.
More information
- Man pages. If you know the name of a program you're
interested in, you can get information on it from its "man"
(manual) page. There are (at least) two ways of doing
this.
- At the command prompt in an x-terminal, type "man
< program > ". E.g. typing "man tar" (without the quotes of
course, and followed by the Enter key) will tell you all
you ever wanted to know about the tar archiving program.
- Open tkman by clicking on the manuals icon. This lets
you view man pages using a graphical interface. It also
lets you search the pages for keywords, which is useful if
you know what functionality you're looking for but don't
know the name of the actual program.
- Web pages. As time goes by we will work on
establishing a set of web pages giving an overview of X
programs that people are most likely to wish to use
(including links to printable documentation where
applicable). Look for these under
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/services.html.
- Info. If you open the emacs editor (icon available)
and look under the Help menu, you'll see an item labeled
"Browse Manuals". This is an interface to the "info"
hypertext system which has greater detail on some programs
than the regular man pages.
- You can also browse the sub-directories of /usr/doc for
further details on many programs.