Desktop Icons

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As you can see, there are three icons on the desktop: user’s Home, Start Here, and Trash. To makes things simple, we’ll start with the easiest and, no doubt, most familiar of these: Trash.

Trash

There is nothing mysterious about Trash . . . at least nothing mysterious about the desktop Trash icon. It functions just as it does in other operating systems. Drag a file you no longer need or want to the Trash icon, and the can will fill up. If you want to empty the Trash, just right-click the Trash icon and, from the popup menu, select Empty Trash. If you drag something into the Trash that you are not supposed to, you will be informed that you can’t do that. All very simple and familiar, no matter from whence you came.

Start Here

Despite the name of this icon, you needn’t start with it. In fact, you can completely ignore it, as it is merely a collection of system preference links that can be more easily selected from the Main menu, but more on that later.

user’s Home

The user’s Home icon on your own desktop will not say “user’s.” It will instead be labeled with whatever your username happens to be. For example, my username is “rg,” so my desktop icon says “rg’s Home.” If you are logged in as malachi, it will say “malachi’s Home,” and so on. All quite logical. Of course, I can’t possibly guess the username of every person reading this book, so I will stick to the more generic “user’s Home,” or just “Home,” when referring to this icon, and, as you will soon find out, I will do so very often.

As you will notice, the Home icon is the image of a house (home) on a folder. This should tell you that it is your home folder — something like the My Documents folder in a Windows system. This is where all your files will be saved to, all your downloads will be downloaded to, and all your music will be ripped to. It is your territory and, even if you are on a multi-user machine, nobody except you (assuming you are the only one who knows the root password) will be able to nose around in there.

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