IST280: Internet Applications

Internet Applications

Web browsers

Web browsers are one of the most important programs these days. Fedora offers a good selection of of Web browsers. This selection includes:

Firefox – The Firefox browser is touted as the next generation Web browser from the Mozilla project and is aimed squarely at the dominance of Microsoft Internet Explorer in the browser space. Firefox offers easy-to-use features for dealing cleverly with issues that prove wreaked havoc other Internet browsers, such as viruses, spyware, and pop-ups. Firefox is the featured Web browser in Fedora and Redhat Enterprise Linux.

To start the Firefox, you can either click on the Firefox icon right on the main menu
or type firefox at the shell prompt. By default this browser is installed on Fedora system.

Epiphany – The Epiphany browser is the official Web browser of the GNOME project. It is powered by the Mozilla Layout Engine (sometimes referred to as Gecko). While Epiphany doesn't have all features you find in Firefox, it is designed to be fast and efficient.

If the Epiphany browser is installed on your system, you can run it either from the menu Applications->Internet->Epiphany Web Browser
or from the shell prompt by typing epiphany. If the browser is not installed on your computer, simply run
```
$ yum install epiphany
```

Konqueror – Although Konqueror is the file manager for the KDE desktop, it can also display Web content. Using Konqueror, you can easily go back and forth between Web sites and local files and folders. A testament to the quality of Konqueror is that the Mac OS X browser uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is based on the Konqueror KHTML and kjs engines.

If you are running GNOME and cannot start Konqueror from the menu Applications->Internet->Konqueror, most likely the browser is not installed on your system. You can easily fix it by running
```
yum install konqueror
```
and then run it by typing
```
kfmclient openProfile webbrowsing
```
or going to the main menu.

As a piece of your homework assignment please read about the text Web browser such as lynx, links, and w3m.

E-mail clients

Fedora Linux also provides a good choice of e-mail clients including

Evolution – This is a full-featured e-mail client that also includes ways of managing your contacts, calendars, and tasks. Because it is so easy to use and rich in features, it provides one of the best ways to transition from Windows e-mail client. There are also features in Evolution for connecting to Microsoft Exchange server and Novell GroupWise server. (Please see how to set up a new account in Evolution.)
You can run it either from the main menu Applications->Internet->Email or from a terminal window by typing evolution.
Thunderbird – As with Firefox in the browser area, Thunderbird is the up-and-coming mail client from the Mozilla project. It was designed from the ground up to be secure, fast, and loaded with important features. It also has versions available on Windows and Mac OS X, so you can use the same mail client on different platforms.
Run it from the menu Applications->Internet->Thunderbird email or from shell (thunderbird). Note: this e-mail client is not necessarily installed on your system.
KMail – People who become frustrated with Evolution performance seem to often switch to KMail. Because KMail is a KDE desktop project, it integrates particularly well with the KDE desktop environment. However, many people insist that KMail runs well in GNOME too.
To run it, go Applications->Internet->KMail or type kmail at the shell prompt. Please see how to set a new account for KMail client.
As another part of your homework assignment please read about other e-mail clients.

Remote access

Linux provides a list of ways to remotely connect to your computer. Different types of connection allows us to do different things: transfer files, executes commands, or even remotely work in the graphics environment.

Programs like telnet or rsh (remote shell) allow a user to login from one Linux system to another LInux system and run commands on the remote computer. However, these programs use unsecured protocol and despite the fact that they are still part of almost any Linux system, most system administrators disable them. If you noticed, the default installation of Fedora block the ports for these services.

If you still would like to remotely connect to your machine, you better use ssh (secure shell). This program basically provides the same options as telnet, but it uses a secure protocol. An ssh client is a default part of practically any Linux distribution. In order to connect to a remote computer use:

$ ssh remote_computer_name

In this case the system will use your login on your current computer as login for the remote one. If you need to use a different login name, use

$ ssh -l login_name remote_computer_name

$ ssh login_name@remote_computer_name

For example, in order to connect to the server ist.marshall.edu as user dementiev, I use the following command

$ ssh dementiev@ist.marshall.edu

If you would like to transfer files between your local system and a remote system you can use ftp (File Transfer Protocol). Classical ftp is a command line tool that connects to a remote computer

$ fpt ist-cit.marshall.edu

and allows to browse the remote files and folders a similar way we do locally with cd and ls commands. The same program allows us to copy files back and forth with on the remote system.

A version of classical ftp is another shell program called ncftp which basically provides the same functionality, but gives you a little bit more flexibility and more options.

If you prefer a graphical interface which allows drag-and-drop functionality, you can use KFTPGrabber available on Applications->Internet->KFTPGrabber or from a shell command kftpgrabber. As an alternative, you can consider gftp (it was not installed by default on my system, so I had to use yum install gftp to get it).

FTP is a very old protocol and as such it's a plain text protocol, which means that it is not secured at all. If you would like to use a secure file transfer (which will slow down the speed of down/up-loading of big files) you can use sftp (secure FTP).

$ sftp dementiev@ist.marshall.edu

From the user point of view it looks almost identical to classical ftp, but internally it uses a secure connection. There are several GUI programs that provide graphical interface to SSH protocol and allow you to run remote commands or copy files and folders with simple mouse moves still using the secure connection. One of these programs is called SecPanel. But before we move to it, I would like to mention one more interesting command line tool.

wget is a small program that allows the user to download a file from remote computer by FTP or HTTP protocol. Basically, this program does the same what happens when you click on a download link in your browser. For example, to obtain an RPM with secpanel from its web page, we can use

$ wget http://themediahost.de/secpanel/data/secpanel-0.5.3-1.noarch.rpm
$ rpm -Uvh secpanel-0.5.3-1.noarch.rpm

As the last part of your homework assignment, please read more about the wget program.

Additional reading

Chapter 9 from the course textbook.
Firefox web site