The Home Icon

The Home icon opens Nautilus and takes you to your home directory, which is either under the /home directory or /root if you are logged in as root. If your user name is john, for example, your home directory would be /home/john. Additionally, this icon is named after the user; so, in our example, the Home icon would be called john’s Home (refer to Figure 6-1).

Note

The root user’s home directory is under /root.

Your home directory is the default location for all of a user’s files. Whenever you create a new file of any type in an application (such as OpenOffice.org Writer) and click Save, the Save dialog that appears will show your home directory as the default directory to save in.

6-8. Your Default Save Directory: 8212; Home

Tip

You can save yourself a lot of time browsing through directories by saving your files in your home directory (or its subdirectories).

Of course, saving all of your files within your home directory itself is a bad idea — that is what subdirectories are for. To create a subdirectory within your home folder, you can do one of the following:

• From the Nautilus file manager, choose File > New Folder.

• Right-click on the desktop or in a folder window (such as Nautilus) and choose New Folder.

Regardless of which method you prefer to use, the new folder appears with its default name (untitled folder) selected; type in a name for your new folder and then either press Enter or click another part of the interface to accept the new name.

Figure 6-9. Creating a New Folder