End User Manual

The User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop, written by Nah Soo Hoe and Colin Charles, is a 50 page self-help guide designed for users with little or no computer experience. It is published by the United Nations Development Programme’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and is copyrighted by them (2004). The copyright holders released it under the Creative Commons (attribution variant) license, so it is fair game for inclusion in this wiki, provided attribution is given. The original version can be found here: http://www.iosn.net/training/end-user-manual/

Boilerplate Attribution Notice
''This article is based, in whole or in part, on "User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop", by Nah Soo Hoe and Colin Charles. It was released by the copyright holders, the United Nations Development Programme’s Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP), under the terms of the Creative Commons (attribution variant) license. The original can be found here: http://www.iosn.net/training/end-user-manual/ .''

Preface to the guide
This user guide is meant as an introductory guide for a user to use a modern personal computer (PC) running the Linux operating system. The main aim is to provide a self-learning guide on how to use a modern Linux desktop system. It assumes that the user has no prior knowledge of Linux or PC usage.

After going through the guide the reader should be in a position to start using a Linux desktop for both personal and office use. In particular she should be able to:
 * access the Internet and use the WWW and Internet email


 * manipulate and manage files, folders and the file system


 * produce and print simple documents and presentation materials


 * advance to become a power user by further self-learning and exploring

Linux has many distributions and sometimes the programs or tools used to perform a certain function can vary from distribution to distribution. This guide tries to be as generic as possible in the description of the features and functionalities. However, in some cases, especially some of the GUI desktop configuration tools, there is no really independent generic tool that can be used and each distribution has its own tool. In such cases, we have tried to illustrate their usage using Fedora Linux.

This guide was written on a Fedora Linux system and as such many of the screen shots reflect this. (The screenshots are not used in the LQwiki version of this guide.) However, this should not be construed as an endorsement of this distribution of Linux over the others on the part of the authors.