Ubuntu install glitch
 

My first Linux install was smooth sailing,even got to rebooting an old Compaq computer, signing in, being congratulated and told I had new e-mail and then I confronted this prompt:

(mycomputername):~$

Haven't found what that refers to and can't get any further. Any ideas?

That's the prompt for your shell. You are on the command line (which, by the way, you should learn to use; it's much more powerful than the graphical interfaces and saves a lot of time). Did you get a graphical interface at all? If you installed X, try doing "startx" on the command line.

Thanks for the response but still no graphics. It's still telling me "Command not found" but at least I've an idea of which ballpark I'm in -- some variation of "start__" I presume. Muchos gracias.

Does this help?

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-39726.html

What kind of install did you do? I know the Ubuntu server install excludes X. did you just hit enter at the boot screen or did you pass it any parameters?

Nothing fancy about the install, I just hit the hit enter, if that tells you anything.
And thanks aysiu I'll check out a few tutorials too...