Ubuntu/Preferences/English
Hello and welcome to this spoken-tutorial on how to set preferences for your Ubuntu operating system. We can set all our preferences using preferences sub-menu which is under system menu. Lets start exploring the preferences sub menu by going through each one of them. Go to the System menu then choose Preferences. In Preferences the first option is About me. Lets click on it. It gives information about the logged-in user and details such as contact details, address and personal info. On the top right hand corner there is a button called "change password" to change the password of the current user. So lets check it out. I click on change password button now. It is asking for current password for authentication. This is a very important feature which safe-guards your machine from anyone who may want change your password. Now lets type the password and press enter. Its saying authenticated. Now I can enter the new password. I will type it here. Press tab. And re-type to confirm it. Now press enter. Thats it. Your password has changed but the same window is displayed again, so don't get confused. To check whether your new password is working or not, type your new password and press authenticate. If it works that means your new password is working and then close both the windows by pressing close buttons on windows. window1 and window2.
now lets goto next one i.e appearence.In this we can change the desktop background,fonts,themes and visual effects. So lets open each tab and see them in detail. First one is theme. In this we can change the theme of the operating system by which we can change the look n feel of the windows and window buttons etc. Now lets select the clearlooks one. As soon as we select it u can see that all the windows has changed their look n feel. If u want to customize this also u can do that by clicking on customize button and select which colour,controls, window border, icons and pointer. So lets click on customize button. U can see all mentioned character things in different tabs. So lets see the control tab first. lets select the 'ambience'. As soon as u click u can see the change. In colour tabs u can change background and text colours of windows, input boxes, selected items and the tooltips. On similar lines you can goto windows border tab, icons tab and pointer tab and choose them according to your need and preferences. Now let me close this customize theme window. If you want to install any more themes you can download the theme packages from the internet and then add them by clicking on this install button otherwise you can directly install themes online by clicking on this "get more themes online" link. Next is background where u can change the desktop background and add and remove more background images and u can also install more background by clicking om "get more backgrounds online". U can set the style such as zoom, centered,span etc by setting in style drop down and u also set the color using color dropdown box.Then comes fonts preferences here u can set the fonts for the application font, window titles, desktop, document and fixed width font and rendering styles. Lets goto visual effects tab now. In this we can see three types of mode are there. None, Normal and extra. What we are using normal mode right now. So lets change it to none mode and see what changes happen by minimising and maximizing window. Now lets repeat the same step for extra mode.But this take few seconds to get actived and it gives a dialog box asking for "keep previous settings" and "keep current settings". Select keep current settings. Now to see its effect. just try to move the window. see you can see the window is giving shaking effect. To complete this tutorial i keeping back to normal mode for simplicity and moving forward for next submenu.Lets close this window.
Next is assistive technology.Lets go back to system->preferences->assitive technology. Lets open it. Here we can see three important buttons.one preferred applications,
blue-tooth preferences
Gwibber n broadcast preferences
ibus preferences
keyboard
keyboard shortcuts: In this we can set the keyboard shortcuts as per our need. Lets open it going to system -> preferences -> keyboard shortcuts. if you scroll through them we can see all the assigned to the all the things such as opening application menu, closing windows etc. So to set any short cut just click on that. For example for opening ubuntu main menu short cut key is Alt+F1 by default. So lets change the short cut key from Alt+F1 to Clt+F1.Before making any changes, make sure that new selected short cut is not already assigned to some other function. Now lets make the change to the main menu so first select it and then immediately press those keys which you want to assign. here i press clt and F1 so u can see that when u selected it, it is giving as new shortcut under shortcut column of select row. As soon as we pressed clt and f1 it changes to clt+f1 as we can see.so lets close it and try whether our shortcut is working or not.Now I press clt+f1 see menu is open. So our shortcut is worked successfully.
The shortcuts u can customize are grouped as follows:
Sound:Shortcuts for controlling your music player and the system volume. Desktop:These are general shortcuts for the whole desktop, such as logging out, locking the screen, opening the panel menubar, or launching a web browser. Window Management:Shortcuts for working with windows and workspaces, such as maximizing or moving the current window, and switching to another workspace. Accessibility:Shortcuts for starting assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, a magnifier or an on-screen keyboard. Custom Shortcuts:Custom shortcuts that have been added with the Add button. This section will not be shown if there are no custom shortcuts. To add a custom shortcut, use the Add button in the action area. You have to provide a name and a command for the new shortcut. The new custom shortcut will appear in the list of shortcuts and can be edited in the same way as the predefined shortcuts. To remove a custom shortcut, use the Remove button. Lets close this and move to another preference application.
Main menu: This is used to customize application and system menus of ubuntu main menu. So lets open main open for that goto system->preferences -> Main menu.Here you can see a list of menus in the left column and a list of menu items for the selected menu are shown in the right column. Here Accessories menu is selected resulting in the Accessories menu items to be shown in the right column. Items displayed in italics are available but not currently displayed in the Ubuntu main menu. You can activate an item by clicking on the checkbox to the left of the item. Disabling menu items works the same way i.e disabling the menu item.
Here u can see that the Ubuntu Panel menu item is inactive. Now lets make Ubuntu Panel menu item active. So lets check our menu whether change happened or not. See u can see panel under accessories. So lets go back to main menu preferences. Back on the main menu window you'll notice you can make other significant changes to the menu using the bottoms off to the right side of the window. You can create a new menu, item, separator, move items, view properties and delete selected menu items. Click on Revert for the default settings or Close to save your menu changes.
