Idea #5996: Give a discription as to what a terminal is.

146

Written by Cheesecake the 29 Mar 08 at 11:05. Category: Accessibility.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

When you press ctrl alt f1 ect you get a terminal indepenant of X and is wonderfull if you know what your doing, but say my mum accadentally presses ctrl alt f1. Not knowing really what she is doing or the cat lands on the keyboard and puts it into a terminal. She would think the computer is broken and be very confused on how to fix it I think we should put a discription as to what it is and how to get back to X

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Eldmannen wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 11:30

HI WOMAN OVER THERE WITH THE CONFUSED AND PUZZLED FACE.
THIS IS THE COMMAND-LINE INTERFACE.
NO YOUR COMPUTER IS NOT BROKEN.
PRESS CTRL+ALT+F7 TO GET BACK TO WORKING.

oblique63 wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 12:01

there was no need to be sarcastic there man.. its a perfectly reasonable idea, and it would really be a perfectly reasonably solution to place a notice at the top of the terminal that actually says "Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 To Get Back To Desktop." or something. there's no harm in trying to help out confused newcomers...

+1

ajjeckmans wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 15:07

First time I experienced this I had no clue on how to get back to the "normal" desktop. I ended up rebooting the pc to be able to look it up on the internet.

very handy indeed to give some sort of notion to what you should do.

Robsie wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 21:07

MMM yes I agree. I didn't know that was the shortcut?

Robsie wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 21:13

lovely now I know!! Hey you know you can use ttys like unix, bloody heck I love that, screw the gui I'm going back to the bash...

takavar wrote on the 29 Mar 08 at 21:59

The shortcut is 3 keys, so its not really necessary since a force restart would get you back to gui
-1

jerieljan wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 00:26

putting in a preliminary note, say, You are now in a terminal mode (or something)
Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to go back

can actually help.

@takavar
right, force restart. that's an awesome idea if the user had very critical programs currently running. [/sarcasm]

jooo wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 02:39

I reckon it's a good idea. Seems trivial enoungh to implement, and it would help a lot of linux newbies.

deadimp wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 05:34

Second.
I was reading the brief description in the listing, though "Hey, that's interesting" and struck the keys. Stupid me, I didn't actually click on the post.
Luckly, the week before I had installed and breifly learned how to use lynx, so I Googled my way out of that.

mp3phish wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 06:02

it is ignorant to say that something like this is bad and shouldn't be built in. If you don't want the sytem to be user friendly, then go to another OS.

Cheesecake wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 06:11

my father has told me that this warning can be put in /etc/issue so there is no extra coding effort involved all it need is for someone to write up the warning and get it put in the offical builds

nathan_s wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 07:15

Yep, "Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to your desktop." seems perfectly reasonable. If it annoys technical users, it would be easy enough for them to remove the lines from their .bashrc file.

Cheesecake wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 09:59

I think there should be a little bit of a discription as to what it is though like "This is the emergancy recovery terminal press ctrl alt f7 to return to the ubuntu desktop"

mathis94 wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 11:18

I agree with nathan_s

ld_barthel wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 11:43

But what if the desktop isn't on the "F7" tty?

Let's say you were in the middle of something but left your desktop and Grandma goes to check her email, so she uses the "Log on as another user" feature. Her desktop will probably be on the "F8" tty...

We probably should use something more like
"Press Ctrl+Alt+F7 to return to the first graphical desktop." as the second line in /etc/issue

vytah wrote on the 30 Mar 08 at 20:15

After several X server crashes (well, Wine made them) my desktop went so far as Ctrl-Alt-F10. So, assuming F7 is bad.
Can there be written some detecting program that finds all local graphical terminals and lists them? With usernames?

jimmux wrote on the 31 Mar 08 at 06:32

This is one of those simple but effective ideas that brainstorm was made for. I like.

ubunteando wrote on the 31 Mar 08 at 09:06

Not only for your mom...

Yesterday I read the title of the post and went into terminal mode and I didnt know how to go back... So I had to poweroff and turn the pc back on...

A line reading: Presss CTRL+ALT+F7 to go back would be great!

3wings wrote on the 23 Apr 08 at 22:41

Good idea, +1.

But then again, you don't *accidentally* press ctrl+alt+f1 :)

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