The control panel is a launching pad for a number of different system administration tools. They make your life easier by letting you configure things without remembering configuration file formats and awkward command line options.
To start the control-panel, start the X Window System as root with startx
and type control-panel in an xterm. You will need to be root
to run the control-panel tools successfully. You can do this as
well if you already have X running as a normal user. Just type
su -c control-panel and then type the root password when prompted.
If you plan to do other tasks as root, you could type su - followed
by the root password when prompted. You will then be given a root
shell. Here, you will need to type DISPLAY=:0 control-panel &
to get the control panel to work. The ``DISPLAY'' part tells the
control panel to use your display. This syntax works only for
a Bourne-compatible shell like bash. If you run tcsh, you would enter
setenv DISPLAY :0; control-panel &.
Double clicking on an icon starts up a tool. Please
note that you are not prevented from starting two instances of
any tool, but doing so is a very bad idea because you may try
to edit the same files in two places and end up overwriting your own
changes. If you do
accidentally start a second copy of a tool, you should quit it
immediately. Also, do not manually edit any files managed by
the control-panel tools while the tools are running. Similarly,
do not run any other programs that may change those files while
the tools are running.
8.1 User and Group Configuration
8.2 File System Configuration
8.3 Printer Configuration
8.4 Network Configuration
8.5 Time and Date
8.6 Kernel Daemon Configuration