Getting to the Shell
Richard A. Blum, Christine Bresnahan · 2015
This chapter discusses what is required to reach a command line environment. It talks about the terminal emulation packages that you may run into in the various Linux distributions. It also describes common software packages that provide graphical terminal emulation. Although many graphical terminal emulator packages are available, the focus in the chapter is on three commonly used ones: GNOME Terminal, Konsole Terminal, and xterm. GNOME Terminal is the GNOME desktop environment's default terminal emulator. The chapter analyzes the GNOME Terminal in the GNOME, Unity, and KDE desktop environments. The KDE Desktop Project created its own terminal emulation package called Konsole Terminal. The chapter describes features of this terminal and shows how to use them. The oldest and most basic of terminal emulation packages is xterm. The xterm package allows one to set individual features using command line parameters. The chapter discusses these features and how to change them.