Finally got this damn thing installed. I think. I used the install in Windows option with wubi, it took hours to get the install to work. Now what do I do?

what were you trying to install it on? a 286? *LOL*
well now that you have it installed, you can install packages that you want.

The install kept getting stuck at certain points, when it finally did install it then decided to get stuck at checking battery status. I had to find out how to get around that and here I am. I'm going to spend the next few days backing up the win7 install and play about with RAWtherapee to see how I like it. Next week I plan to format the laptop and do a clean install of ubuntu.

I need to learn what commands not to play with just yet!

Oh I just remembered, I was getting an error message saying nfts5 prefix not set. I had no idea what that meant but after many tries it installed.

well you can download this. virtualbox linux host
make a vhd of your win7 and run it inside of ubuntu.
you can use the disk2vhd
ya may need to convert it with vmware converter

avoids the need to reboot into windows from ubuntu or do a herman cain on your mbr and trash it.
and it allows you to act crazy in the vm and do shit you wouldn't normally do on the real OS.
you can even run ubuntu in ubuntu I think.
fuck it, be a pioneer and tell me how you made out cause I don't want to mess up my install.*LOL*

ntfs5 something win7 did that ubuntu doesn't like.
now forge ahead and do some pioneering shizznit.*LOL*

learn your way around apt apt-update apt-get blah blah
I alway liked apt
hell it's been a minute but did like linux but again it's a love hate relationship I have with linux for more years then I can remember LOL

Are there any good sites for learning the useful/most used terminal commands?

on the ubuntu site there were links and I believe a forum.
but a google for ubuntu commands and learning ubuntu should yield you some good results.
it didn't take me long after installing ubuntu cloud server and ubuntu that I needed more apps and utils.
I know just enough to accomplish what I need, other than that I don't put much effort into being a expert.

The only command I know at the moment is reboot! Had to do it so many times before I activated the correct video card driver. I need to play about with the photo-editing stuff and find out how to get music on my iPhone without iTunes, and to find an image stacking program like startrails.de

It's quite nice not being tied to any particular windows software. The next computer will be a desktop for photo-editing and a tablet for web-browsing.