Once GNU/Linux is correctly installed, you boot simply by turning on the power and waiting a couple of minutes. Shutting down is only slightly trickier; as emphasized already, a GNU/Linux system will suffer data corruption if it is not shut down properly. In Mandrake, there is a button labelled shutdown in the graphical login window. Just click on it with the mouse pointer and select shutdown or reboot. Lots of messages will scroll up the screen, saying that processes are being killed, services are shutting down, and filesystems are being unmounted. It is safe to turn off the power when you see the words shut down, power down, system halted, or the like.
A GNU/Linux system may also be halted or rebooted from the command
prompt (by root) as follows: halt or
shutdown -h now shuts down immediately, reboot or
shutdown -r now reboots immediately. These commands are
safe as long as you are the only person logged on. As already
mentioned, a GNU/Linux system can run for weeks or months without any
problems. You should never need to reboot as a normal part of
system administration; GNU/Linux is not Windows. There are some
reasons not to shut down the computer, though they are more important
for systems with many users. A GNU/Linux system automatically performs
bookkeeping tasks at odd hours. For example, there is a database
containing the names of all files in the system that is updated daily
(at an early morning time when the system use is likely to be low). If
you shut your system down every day, this database must be updated
manually. It is possible to configure your system to run such tasks
even if it is turned off nightly, but this is not the default
behavior.