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Okay, so now we assume that you’ve installed Ubuntu 9.04.

When you’ll boot into Ubuntu, you’ll be welcomed by the GNOME Desktop Environment.

Now you may be wondering what is a Desktop Environment? Well, Desktop Environment refers to the style of user interface. In Linux, we have various types of Desktop Environments like GNOME, KDE and Xfce. In UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, these Desktop Environments work over the X Window System about which we’ll tell you later. In layman’s words, we can say that X Window System is the base on which all these Desktop Environment work.

Okay now, we started Ubuntu and are ready to use it. Here is a glimpse of Ubuntu running GNOME…

At the bottom right corner, you’ll see a Trash icon which is equivalent to the Recycle Bin of Windows.

Adjacent to the Trash can are the Workspaces. These are multiple desktops. If one workspace gets cluttered because you’ve opened many programs, then you can shift to anyone of the other workspaces. (This is something which you may have seriously been missing in Windows)…

The top and the bottom bars are called Panels. The top Panel contains three main Menus.

• Applications – from where you select the application which you want to run
• Places – I guess this willbe self explanatory.Nautilus is the file managing software of the GNOME Desktop Environment.In simple words, Nautilus is the ‘Windows Explorer’ of GNOME.
• System – This menu contains the various options to configure & administrate your OS….!!!

To ‘Shut the computer down’ or ‘Log out’, you just have to click on your nickname in the top right corner.

Now lets learn to change the Desktop Background and Themes.  Just right click any where on the Desktop, click on ‘Change Desktop Background’ and there you go.

Click on the +Add buton under the Background tab to browse for more images. Theme can be changed from the ‘Theme’ tab.

For more themes you may visit www.gnome-look.org