Moha the almighty camel's questions

I have a fresh ubuntu installation.
everytime I try to restart or shutdown, I got the following

And that's it. I am forcing shut down everytime.

Any idea what can I do to fix it? or to gather more information to find out why this is happening.

Thank you

EDIT some other information that might be helpful:
- I am dual booting with windows 10
- ubuntu is installed on an SSD partition that I shrinked through windows disk management
- there are other issues with the installation as well, like battery not charging even when plugged in but it is working fine in windows.

I have two files file1.txt , flie2.txt in a directory X. I want to copy those files to my current working directory which is far away from the directory X.

so I end up with a command like:

cp ~/Desktop/dir/dir/dir/dir/file1.txt ~/Desktop/dir/dir/dir/dir/file2.txt .

Is there anyway to use the directory path once for both file, some kind of a shortcut ?
I am sure there is, Ubuntu never failed my laziness :D

I am playing around with pipes to learn how to use them. I am trying this command to kill a process by name: pgrep <some_process> | kill

but the output I am getting is the usage instruction for kill, like it didn't receive any input.

of course I know there are easier way to accomplish the same task like pkill or killall, but I want to know why is this not working.

Thank you

I have Ubuntu 14.04.1 and Skype 4.03.0.37. my audio devices are working fine but when I make Skype calls I can't hear the other person neither they can hear me.

when I checked Skype audio settings it showed virtual device as the only option for all devices.

I tried a lot of proposed solutions on the web and nothing helped.

what could be the problem and how can I fix it?
I know there is not a lot of details in the question to help, what extra details do I need to provide ?

Thank you so much.

Every time I connect to the network at work my device gets a new IP address which makes it /etc/hosts/ invalid and my hostname becomes unreachable.

I was looking for a way to set /etc/hosts automatically every time I reconnect and I came across dhclient-scrip.

I am pretty new to Ubuntu world and honestly I got lost through all this :)

All I need is just to update the IP of my local hostname when my local IP changes.

Thanks
EDIT: here is my /etc/hosts

128.141.239.50 mtahawi.comp.com mtahawi
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 mtahawi

so the problem is: the IP I am mapping to my hostname mtahawi.comp.com is changing when I reconnect.
I forgot to say I am using a WiFi.

I need to save the result of a grep command into a file, but I also want the output file to be formatted and keep the colors just like in the terminal.

Is there a way to do that? Maybe make grep save to a some kind of markup language? If it is not possible, is there another tool that can accomplish this task?

I am trying to make the search keyword stand out in the output file, exactly like it does in the terminal.

I'm trying to install Euler expert system following these instructions. To add the environment variable I edited my /etc/environment to become as follows:

 PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:
/home/mohammad/Desktop/eye"
 EYE_HOME = "/home/mohammad/Desktop/eye"

But when I use printenv PATH I don't see the new directory added to my path.

What am I doing wrong here?

Recently, I started using tmux; I'm trying to use the pair programming feature in that software. During the process a socket file was created. My question is: what are socket files, how am I to open them on Ubuntu and how are they used?