Ubuntu Administrative Tools
Administration is handled by a set of separate specialized administrative tools developed and supported by Ubuntu, such as those for user management and display configuration. To access the GUI-based Ubuntu tools, you log in as a user who has administrative access. (This is the user you created when you first installed Ubuntu.)
On the GNOME desktop, you can access system administrative tools from the System | Administration menu. Here you will find tools to set the time and date, to manage users, configure printers, and install software. Users and Groups lets you create and modify users and groups. Printing lets you install and reconfigure printers. All tools provide intuitive GUIs that are easy to use. In the Administration menu, tools are identified by simple descriptive terms, whereas their actual names normally begin with terms such as admin or system-config. For example, the printer configuration tool is called Printing on the Administration menu, but its actual name is system-config-printer, whereas Users and Groups is admin-users. You can separately invoke any tool by entering its name in a terminal window.
The GUI tools are normally either GNOME administrative tools, with KDE counterparts, or administrative tools adapted from the Fedora distribution supported by Red Hat Linux. The GNOME administrative tools are suffixed with the term admin, and the Fedora tools use the prefix system-config. In Ubuntu, the Printing administrative tool is Fedora's system-config-printer, replacing the GNOME printer-admin tool used in previous Ubuntu releases. A Samba GUI tool is now available for Ubuntu, which is the Fedora system-config-samba tool. Some tools will work with Ubuntu but are not yet supported.
The Fedora system-config-lvm tool provides a simple and effective way to manage Logical Volume Manager (LVM) file systems, but it is not yet supported directly by Ubuntu. You can, however, download, convert, and install its software package on Ubuntu and it will work fine.
Table 21-1 shows Ubuntu administration tools.
|
Ubuntu Administration Tools |
Description |
|
Synaptic Package Manager |
APT software management using online repositories |
|
Update Manager |
Updates using APT repositories |
|
time-admin |
Changes system time and date (GNOME) |
|
displayconfig-gtk |
Ubuntu display configuration tool, video card and monitor (GNOME) |
|
system-config-kickstart |
Automatically installs scripts (Fedora/Red Hat) |
|
network-admin |
Configures network interfaces (GNOME) |
|
system-config-cluster |
Manages Global File System (GFS) (Fedora/Red Hat) |
|
system-config-printer |
Configures printer (Fedora/Red Hat) |
|
system-config-samba |
Configures Samba server (Fedora/Red Hat); user level authentication support |
|
shares-admin |
Configures general open shared directories or files; no authentication support |
|
Firestarter |
Configures network firewall |
|
services-admin |
Services tool, manages system and network services such as starting and stopping servers (GNOME) |
|
users-admin |
Configures users and groups |
|
gnome-language-selector |
Selects language |
|
system-config-lvm |
Configures LVM file system volumes (Fedora/Red Hat, unsupported) |
|
sudo and gksu |
Provide administrative access to systemwide commands and applications |
|
PolicyKit service |
Authorizes access by users to specific administrative tools |
Table 21-1 Ubuntu Administrative Tools
Table 21-1 Ubuntu Administrative Tools
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