Oh Dear. :[ Total Newb trying to get this to work!

[12onthebox]

I just installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit onto my Acer Aspire One and so far I am having several issues that I have no idea how to fix. :[ I'm getting messages that say I'm experiencing internal errors. My screen is super dark and I can't fix the brightness level. I'm pretty sure that my installation wasn't a very good one, lol. I struggled for hours trying to figure out how to install it and now that I have it seems that everything is going wrong. :[ At first I tried booting from a USB with 0 success so then I used a CD with Unetbootin I believe and it worked (seemingly). A red icon at the top of the screen is telling me to run the Package Manager with an error message of: Opening the cache (E.Read error -read (5: Input/output error), E:The Package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.)'.

Help! :'[

[cub]

The red icon indicates there are updates available. Some update might solved your screen issue. If you open a terminal and run:

 sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

what is the result?

[byStanderone]

...since it's a fresh install and brewing problems...would suggest return to step one....prepare your disk for a new install...something would have been overlooked.

[_0R10N]

I'd suggest what @cub recommends... it's not unusual that fresh installs experience some stability issues. If after upgrading the problems remain, then you should start asking for help on each one of them separately.

[12onthebox]

Ok my first task was trying to figure out how to open a terminal, lol, I'm not sure if I was doing it right, I did Ctrl-alt-f1 and it asked me to login. I'm not sure what my login ID would be so I just typed in my user name on the computer and the password but it keeps telling me the login is inocorrect. I have no idea what I'm doing.

[12onthebox]

Also, I don't know if this makes a difference but there is nothing on my screen except the bar at the top... aren't there supposed to be icons on the left?

[cub]

Oh, if you don't know your user name and password it might get tricky. Didn't you need to provide it on the login page when you boot the system?

ctrl + alt + t should open a terminal. ctrl + alt +F1 open a virtual console. It will work too, but you need to login again. However to do the sudo command you would need your password again anyhow.

[cub]

http://ubuntu-manual.org/ might come in handy.

Sorry, it is of course updated for 13.04.

[mastablasta]

ctrl-atl-t is the terminal.

what you did is access virtual console. which should have still worked. yeah it's your username and then username's password (assuming the user is first user, as that one will have sudo privileges).

[12onthebox]

Ok I think I figured out the username/password issue. I typed in that code and it ran for a minute, when it stopped it said:

Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-writer_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-calc_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-impress_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-draw_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-common_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/libreoffice-core_1%3a3.5.7-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)


I don't know where to go from there.