Minor Teething problems

**longbreak** · December 17th, 2012

Hello, I just installed Ubuntu and first impressions is that it is not user friendly. My first major problem was how to shut down and/or reboot. I have now found a few methods to get out of trouble there.

While searching for solutions I accidently got into command line screen TTY2? by using Ctrl Alt F2. I then had another game to play trying to find out how to get out of that and finally found it was Ctrl Alt F7 which worked.

However in the meantime the small window on the bottom left had side (don't know what it is called) which seemed to accept commands before no longer does anything. At first the commands used to work, like 'shutdown' etc. Something I did seems to have disabled this 'run menu' which I will call it for want of a better identity.

Any suggestions how to enable this greatly appreciated.

**TOMBSTONEV2** · December 17th, 2012

Which version of ubuntu are you running? If you get into TTY2 again just type sudo reboot I am not entirely sure as to what you are talking about in the rest of your post.

**longbreak** · December 17th, 2012

Thanks Tombstonev2 and sorry for my ramblings. Getting too old for this.
I really was referring to the small pop-up window on the bottom right hand side.
It pops up as soon as I start typing anything on the desktop.

**Ozymandias_117** · December 17th, 2012

That box is simply searching your desktop for any files with that name. To shutdown/reboot etc. click the cog in the top right hand corner of the screen.

**longbreak** · December 17th, 2012

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

**Bölvaður** · December 17th, 2012

To actually execute commands you either need to be in any of the tty sessions you saw or in a terminal window. To open a terminal window go into the search like you did before, but type in

Code:

terminal

.
I highly doubt you actually need to use it at all, but because those commands work everywhere the same in Linux but clicking there and there changes rapidly... then you will see commands posted on-line when there are totally beginner friendly "click click click" ways.

**arpanaut** · December 17th, 2012

This might prove helpful:
http://ubuntu-manual.org/downloads

**longbreak** · December 18th, 2012

Thanks for suggestion. Just tried using terminal in search box and it just disappears without finding anything (as I said earlier). However if I open Dash Home and type in terminal I see and app called terminal which I can click on and it opens a small window. Much less daunting than my other experience where it filled the screen and I didn't know how to get back to the desktop. I can live with that.