Ubuntu Tips and Tricks - Part 1

Just learned some new commands on Ubuntu:

1. If sometime you get into a (big!) trouble such as the Gnome panels not loading but the desktop is visible, you can open the gnome-terminal using the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T (of course this is a good shortcut for normal desktop usage too).

2. Because of the above problem, you may want to create a bootable drive to reinstall Ubuntu, but how do you do that as you cannot load the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator? Don’t worry there is a way - use the following command:

usb-creator-gtk &

to open the Startup Disk Creator utility. I am assuming you had some iso image on the hard disk of your computer. If not you can transfer it using a flash drive and cp command.

3. BTW if you don’t know how to mount a pen drive if it doesn’t happen automatically, use sudo fdisk -l after inserting the pen drive and take note of the device id, most of the times it will be /dev/sdb1. Then issue the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

to mount sdb1 to /mnt directory.

4. And yeah there is sudo poweroff to shutdown the system properly.