I’ve been using Scientific Linux 7.1 at work for a couple of weeks now. If you’ve been using SL7 as a desktop, or are interested in moving this way, the CLASSE IT Group can help you with some of its configuration. This post will also give some ideas of tasks that are useful at work and at home. I’ll post about using it at home a little later on.
In general, one of the great things for me personally while working in the lab, is getting experience with this recent operating system on my desktop. There are many tasks that are just as easily performed on Linux as they are on Windows. Therefore, I am going to document my process, overall issues and solutions in this blog post. Although I won’t be providing step-by-step instructions, you can contact the CLASSE computer group if you would like help configuring your Linux desktop at the lab.
Desktop Environment – There are a plethora of choices. GNOME is the default, KDE is available and I personally prefer and use XFCE. Most of these can be themed or skinned to your desired look, they also are very configurable as to what panels, launchers, workspaces, etc are available as options. My setup is very similar to Windows XP Classic with 4 workspaces. I achieved this with XFCE.
Common Tools –
- Konsole is my favorite terminal program, but you can also use xterm, GNOME terminal and others.
- Firefox is the default browser. This is the same as on CLASSE-managed Windows systems.
- Thunderbird is what I use for e-mail and IRC chat at the lab. It also does XMPP which can then work with our CLASSE chat server.
- Thunar is a useful file manager that is part of XFCE. It defaults to having a path bar which you can type in – much like Windows. For instance, typing smb://samba/user will open up your samba/user path. Of course, on Linux at the lab, you can also type /nfs/user but if you’re used to the samba file organization, the smb path may be more convenient.
- LibreOffice opens most MS files. I’ve used it to create PO-REQ .xlsx files and the Business Office has no problem working with them and processing the order.
- Kcalc is an easy to use calculator that isn’t too hard to remember vs calc in Windows 7.
Other Tasks –
- Print to PDF is built into LibreOffice and Firefox on SL7. All you do is select Print to file, and choose PDF and where to save it. It was a bit hard to find as I was expecting a PDF printer like in Windows 7, but instead it seems to be under the Print to File, as you can select different sorts of files to print to.
Because many of our daily tasks are now web-based, they “just work” in Firefox ESR on Linux. WinApp is accessible for some Windows software that we provide via that service. Rdesktop and RemoteDesktopViewer both support RDP. Flash drives and the like also mount just fine by plugging them in and selecting them from Thunar.
We also already provide many software packages that you might be familiar with from the farm or lnx201, but now I can just run them from any Konsole window.
More interesting are probably the home user tasks. I’ll post about that soon.