three finger salute

[Rob Clack]

I fess up front that I've done no searching for this, but it's late and 
I've only just subscribed and I really have tried in the past to find 
out what's going on here, so here goes.

A friend installed debian linux 3.0 for me and assured me that 
Control/Alt/F1 would flick me back to a console monitor so I could log 
on as root and shut the machine down.  Only it doesn't happen.  The 
traditional 3-fingered salute does nothing.  Actually, most F-keys do 
nothing.  I've tried looking at the KDE key mappings, but few of them 
map to anything I'd recognise, and the ones that do, do nothing.

Probably something pretty basic, but I have no clue even where to start.

Let me clue you in to how dim I am:  There's a footprint icon on the 
panel;  I don't know what that means, in terms of what software I'm 
running, but I'm pretty sure it should tell me something.  When I click 
it, I see, amongst others, KDE menus, which suggests I'm running KDE, 
but then if I choose Panel instead, I see About Gnome (which just lists 
a slow-scrolling list of a million contributors without actually telling 
me anything at all about the version of Gnome I'm running - is there a 
version of Gnome?  How can I tell?  Must I wait for half an hour to get 
to the end of the list?)  So am I running Gnome or KDE or are they in 
some way not the same thing?  I'm sorry, it's late and I've spent most 
of the evening trying to get something I thought rather basic to work, 
and my patience is running thin.  I hope I've not been too offensive. I 
really only want to know about being able to switch back to the console 
monitor so I can log in as root and shut the machine down.

sigh
Rob Clack



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