After I installed Ubuntu 13.10, for some reason my video card does not have output, I just wonder if this is the case, are there any way to shut down Ubuntu using keyboard safely without harm the system?
Your information and help is great appreciated.
If you can access a terminal use sudo poweroff. You can access a TTY by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1; TTY is just a terminal. You can return to the graphical desktop by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7.
Otherwise you can use kernel interupts to safely shutdown the computer:
Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen+R,E,I,S,U,B (Hold down Ctrl, Alt, and Prnt Scrn then press REISUB in that order with about a second pause between each letter)
The keyboard has to be plugged into the computer you want to shut down. The command above will restart the computer. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to just power-off this way. Hit the power button after the computer restarts to keep it from rebooting all the way.
Alternative terminal command which will shutdown computer
sudo shutdown -p now
now can be replaced with +m, where m is the number of minutes to wait until shutting down and hh:mm which specifies the time on the 24hr clock when your computer will shutdown.
Replace -p with -r to reboot instead of shutting your computer down.
Ctrl+Alt+t might open you an terminal if you are unable to access one.
