2. About this Quick-Startup Guide

The goal of this Quick-Startup Guide is to help you understand the installation basics of a GNU/Linux distribution, give you pointers as to what you need to do before actually installing the Mandriva Linux operating system, as well as initiate you into the GNU/Linux environment.

First we discuss technical procedures you should follow (Chapter 1, Installation Warning). We highly recommend you follow these instructions since we touch upon data backup, disk integrity checks, and the like.

We cover the topics of BIOS configuration and supported hardware in Chapter 2, Before Installation. Then comes the installation chapter (Chapter 3, Installation with DrakX).

To get you started with your new system we discuss the KDE graphical environment (Chapter 4, Your New Graphical Environment). You will learn how to configure your background and your panel as well as further understand how to customize your environment's look and feel, how to manage files, and more.

The following chapter discusses network applications such as the KMail mail client (Section 1, “Writing E-mails and Reading News”), the Akregator news reader (Section 1.2, “Akregator”), the Konqueror web browser (Section 2, “Browsing the Web”), and the Kopete instant messaging and chat software (Section 3, “Instant Messaging”).

Next we tackle multimedia applications (Chapter 6, Audio, Movie and Video Applications). We cover audio applications (Section 1, “Audio Applications”), data, audio and ISO image burning (Section 2, “CD Burning”), movie viewers (Section 3, “Movie Applications”, and videoconferencing (Section 4, “Webcams and Video Conferencing”).

Last but not least we describe a few of the numerous games which you can play on Mandriva Linux (Chapter 7, Playing Around). These range from board, card and strategy games to classic arcade-style roller-coaster rides.