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When I switched to Linux I learned a lot from the mistakes I made. Old habits from Windows were my downfall in several instances. For example, when I ran into a problem and things seemed frozen, I hit Alt-Ctl-Del keys to simply sigh and re-boot like I was used to doing in my Windows 98. Wrong thing to do! Or, when I forgot how to shut down, I just turned off the computer. Wrong again!

Linux systems have their own process for shutting down. You may have set up your system at installation to allow you to simply click an item on your KDE menu and then “Shut down” and it all happens for you. But if you want to see the process, you must be in a terminal, switch to root user with the “su” command, and then give it the proper shut down command:

shutdown -h now

At least, that’s if you are the only user of the computer, meaning you are not on a network, and you don’t have a dual boot (with another operating system on this computer).

Your computer will give you a message like this: Linux is going for system halt NOW Then it will show you every step of the process as it closes down all the functioning programs. Mind you, it is a good idea to close all the programs yourself before you give this shutdown command. Still, it has various technical duties, and since Linux is transparent, you will see lines zip by in your terminal showing what your system is checking and shutting down. When it is finished it will give you another message such as; System halted or Power down.

There. Now you can press the power OFF button. No sooner.

I remember one time when I had just pressed the power off button as I was at a loss to know what to do next. When I tried to power up again the computer kept asking me for commands to fix things, and since I didn’t know what they should be, I couldn’t get back into my system! I was locked out for days! I had to use a different computer to go online and cry for help.

If you only want to reboot the computer, give this command instead; shutdown -r now

However, believe me, you won’t need to reboot nearly as often as you did in Windows!

If you are connected to a network of computers you can do damage to the other computer on the network if you give the above commands. So you can plan a certain time to shut them all down at once with this command: shutdown -h 20:01

That will turn everything off at 8:01 pm. Or if you only need to everyone five minutes notice, try this one; shutdown -h +5

Let’s say you have two or more users on your computer. You do not have to shut down or reboot to switch to the other user’s system. In fact, you could run programs in several user modes. I just read that you can use the Alt+F2 keys to pull up a window that allows you to do that. Hmm.. . I didn’t know that. I have switched to root whenever I open a program and it requires me to log in a root before I can proceed. No problem. I haven’t really had a need to switch to another user, but I think I saw a place where I could click on something to do that. I’m sure there’s more than one way to do this. Just rest assured that other operating systems don’t allow this, but Linux does. If you need to, the Alt+F2 is an easy one to remember.

Next time we’ll look at some text editors. We’ve got a smorg to choose from!