gnome-terminal -- The default Terminal emulator window that comes with GNOME. It
consumes more system resources than xterm does, and it has useful menus for cutting
and pasting, opening new Terminal tabs or windows, and setting terminal profiles.
konsole -- The konsole terminal emulator that comes with the KDE desktop environ-
ment. With konsole, you can display multi-language text encoding and text in different
colors.
The differences in running commands within a Terminal window have more to do with the shell
you are running than the type of Terminal window you are using. Differences in Terminal windows
have more to do with the features each supports -- for example, how much output is saved that
can be scrolled back to, whether you can change font types and sizes, and whether the Terminal
window supports features such as transparency.
Using Virtual Terminals
Most Linux systems that include a desktop interface start multiple virtual terminals running on the
computer. Virtual terminals are a way to have multiple shell sessions open at once outside of the
graphical interface you are using.
You can switch between virtual terminals much the same way that you would switch between
workspaces on a GUI. Press Ctrl+Alt+F1 (or F2, F3, F4, and so on up to F6 on Fedora and other
Linux systems) to display one of six virtual terminals. The next virtual workspace after the virtual
terminals is where the GUI is, so if there are six virtual terminals, you can return to the GUI (if one
is running) by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7. (For a system with four virtual terminals, you return to the
GUI by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F5.)
Choosing Your Shell
In most Linux systems, your default shell is the bash shell. To find out what your current login
shell is, type the following command:
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash
In this example, it's the bash shell. There are many other shells, and you can activate a different one
by simply typing the new shell's command (
ksh
,
tcsh
,
csh
,
sh
,
bash
, and so forth) from the cur-
rent shell. For example, to change temporarily to the C shell, type the following command:
$ csh
Most full Linux systems include all of the shells described in this section. However,
some smaller Linux distributions may include only one or two shells. The best way to
find out if a particular shell is available is to type the command and see if the shell starts.
NOTE
NOTE
38
Linux First Steps
Part I
