Glossary of Windows Terms

Add/Remove Programs

  Use &software-center; to install applications from Ubuntu’s software library, or to remove existing applications from your computer. Use &synaptic; for more advanced tasks.

Control Panel

  Settings that affect everyone who uses Ubuntu on this computer are found in &administration;. Settings that just affect you are accessed from &preferences;.

Explorer

  To manage the files and folders on your computer, start by choosing an item from the Places menu.

Favorites

  Use Places for easy access to commonly-used folders. Firefox has Bookmarks, which are equivalent to Favorites in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer

  You can use Firefox to search the Web and visit Web sites: &firefox;.

Log Off

  To close all your programs and leave the computer ready for someone else to log in, click the User Switcher in the top right hand corner of the screen and then press Log out.

My Computer

  Equivalent items to those in the My Computer window are found in various places in Ubuntu.

  - To see the disks and storage devices connected to the computer, choose &computer;.

My Documents

  Inside your home folder (&home-folder;), you can arrange documents and other files in whatever folders you wish.

Printers & Faxes

  Open &printing; to set up printers.

  To setup a fax modem, see Faxing.

Recycle Bin

  The Trash works much the same way as the Recycle Bin. The Trash is almost always at the bottom right corner of the screen.

Standby

  To put your computer into a power-saving mode until you resume using it, click the User Switcher in the top right hand corner of the screen, then Suspend or Hibernate. (Hibernate requires no power at all, but is slower, and is not available on some types of computer.)

Start button

  The three menus at the top left of the screen - Applications, Places, and System - contain most of the same things as the Start menu in Windows.

Task Manager

  To see or halt currently running programs, or to track processor and memory usage, choose &system-monitor;.

Windows Media Player

  Programs that play music and movies, and rip music CDs, are available from &soundandvideo;.

Windows Update

  To check for updates to Ubuntu, open &ubuntu-update-manager;.