Console

From Mandriva Community Wiki

Graphical consoles

There are a lot of graphical consoles. These are the ones you can open while you are on your favourite desktop such as KDE, GNOME, XFCE or LXDE.

One of the most used ones is Konsole from KDE. It is very elegant since you can choose colour themes and personalize it easily, and is very flexible since it supports tabs and the possibility to cut a window in two.

But there are others as well : xterm, mrxvt... often lighter.

Text consoles or tty

There are other types of consoles accessible by pressing specific keyboard buttons such as ctrl-alt-F<n> with <n> going from 1 to 6. You must press alt-F7 to come back to your graphical environment.

You can use this type of console (called tty) if you have a serious graphical problem on your system for example. It is very useful to know its existence.

The guest

The command prompt is the part that is displayed when you open a console. You can only enter a command in front of a prompt.

Here is a pompt :

[user@computer ~]$

When you are as root, you will have a different prompt :

[root@computer ~]#

You can find more information on As easy as a shell.

The commands

Commands are instructions you type in the console. These commands can be validated by pressing enter.

To know more about this subject, it is recommended that you read : As easy as a shell

A small memento of useful commands :

• pwd : displays the current directory
• cd /home/tfoo/images  : 'move to another directory
• ls : lists the content of the folder
• cp file file-two : creates a copy of the file with as new name file-two
• mv /home/foo/images/titi.png /home/foo/titi.png : Moves a file
• mkdir my_new_folder : creates a new new folder
• cat file.log : displays the content of file.log

Tip !
The tab button helps spending less time by using the completion of a command line. You do not need to type everything !

This list is not exhaustive, it is a vital minimum for all newcomers to the console. Very quickly, you will learn more interesting and useful options, as you will use them more. Read on to As easy as a shell.

Other articles are available in the designed category : Shell