Kubuntu Newbie Experience II - Connecting to the Internet

After logging in, I surveyed my desktop and found it cleaner than other linux distros. On the lower left corner of my screen is a K button with a gear. I say to myself, it must be something like a Start button. And well, yeah, it is. I clicked it and up pops several menu options. By the way, I recently found out what it is. Its called a K-menu. Give me another *ding* for not reading the manual - but who does, eh?

I wanted to connect to the Internet so I chose 'Internet'. I remember in Windows I have to set up an Internet connection by going through a wizard. Here, I'm not so sure.

Here's what I did nevertheless.

1. I clicked on the K-Menu, and rolled my mouse over to System and clicked on Konsole (Terminal Program).
   - A box which closely resembles a DOS box in Windows XP appears with the text
   {your user name}@{name}: ~$
   
2. Then I clicked on the Session Menu at the top of the box and clicked on New Root Shell so that I could enter commands that require root or administrator like process.
   
3. It then asked me for my Kubuntu password. I typed it in.
   
4. Afterwards I typed the command 'pppoeconf'
   
5. A series of dialog boxes then appeared asking a lot of questions. One was, what is your username and password? (For the Internet Connection that is - I remember, my ISP gave it to me.
   
6. I typed my Internet account username and password and proceeded to choose 'Yes' for all of the other questions
   
   
   - the last message told me that 'the connection is now active'
   

And viola, I am now online. Other than that of course, there seems to be no indication that I am now online. So I proceeded to look for a web browser. In Windows XP I had Internet Explorer. In Kubuntu I have Konqueror.



The Konqueror browser has some interesting features: among them would be its second nature of being a File Explorer. In short it's sort of like Windows Explorer + Internet Explorer.

The only downside that I could see is that it isn't usually compliant with a lot of websites. Which means, that you won't be able to access certain websites and that some websites would then have less features. For example, blogger beta doesn't show the Edit HTML and Compose tabs. It can also be annoying since I can't edit the fonts, font-color, format, and links of this blog post without getting my hands dirty with entering HTML codes.

Another interesting feature of Konqueror is that the first time you open it, a box asking you to enter a password appears. This is for the program KDE wallet. No, it doesn't have money inside it. Just passwords for certain websites that you visit. It's just like the program Gator - only that it doesn't spy on you.

For my next post I will be discussing Kubuntu's IM client.