SOME PEOPLE ARE HAPPY WITH THEIR OPERATING systems as installed.Others like to tinker. StiLl oth¬ers-PC Magazine readers, oftenenough-need to dive under the hood and make those systems runex¬actly the way they want. It's all about control, and Linux givesyou as much control as you can handle. The configuration tools in Ubuntu Linux provide a full range of custom¬ization choices. Someare cosmetic, of course, but others dig deep into system settings. As with so much in Linux, the key is fi nding the settings; once you're there, confi guration is fairly straight¬forward. For less-than-straightforward settings, stay tuned for future columns.

THE ADMINISTRATION MENU

Another set of applets can be found in the Administration menu, also accessible through the main System menu. For example, Network Tools, one of the many applets available here, contains a series of tabs that provide extensive information about your network connection: Traceroute, Ping, Lookup, Finger, and Netstat can provide highly useful details for troubleshooting Choosing Services opens the Services settings window, from which you can toggle system services on or off. The System logs give you full details about system behavior, while Shared Folders lets you establish Unix or Windows network support to share directories among different machines. The protocols for these shared folders will need to be installed, but the Shared Folders dialog box automatically gives you the option to do so.

THE PREFERENCES MENU

The Preferences submenu of the main System menu (the most¬direct counterpart to Windows' Control Panel) contains options for accessibility, desktop background, displayed fonts, keyboard and battery behavior, and much more. Under Font Preferences, for example, you can choose among Monochrome display, Best contrast. Best shape, or Subpixel smoothing (LCDs). Control fonts further by clicking Details and adjusting such options as Hinting, which can help with the display of especially small text.

THE SESSIONS DIALOG

Found under Preferences, the Sessions dialog lets you decide which programs run on start-up As with Windows, the initial group is determined during installation, with others added as you install new software. To add new items, click New and then browse to the "bin" subdirectory of the File System directory. Scroll to the program (often unintuitively named) and doubleclick it. Set your start-up programs and their behavior-under the Current Session tab you can choose the order of the programs- then save them from the Session Options tab.