What does "Open a console/terminal" mean?

Question

I want to install a file and the instructions say "Open a console/terminal", then "and cd to the location where the installer was downloaded". What does this mean in plain English? It seems one has to be a computer geek to do the simplest thing in Linux!

Answer 1

Open the terminal by searching for it in the Dash, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + T.

In the terminal use the command cd to change the present working directory to a new directory (directory is used as a synonym for folder). For example, to change directory to your Desktop type the command:

cd ~/Desktop  

followed by pressing Enter. So if you downloaded the file to your Downloads folder, you would use the command:

cd ~/Downloads  

to change the present working directory to this location.

You can also type cd in the terminal followed by a space character and drag the folder icon of the directory that you want to change to from the file manager into the terminal, and then the full path to that directory will be automatically entered into the terminal for you.

Answer 2

It means you need to go to command line and start typing commands (or copy/paste them)4

Hit the super key to open Dash and type "terminal"

and you will see something similar to this:

and you can start typing commands.

There are 4 methods to get to a command line when using Unity:

• Dash -> Search for Terminal
• Dash -> More Apps -> 'See More Results' -> Terminal
• Dash -> More Apps -> Accessories -> Terminal
• Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl + Alt + T

For more information I would suggest reading this wiki page:

Why use the command-line?

"Under Linux there are GUIs (graphical user interfaces), where you can point and click and drag, and hopefully get work done without first reading lots of documentation. The traditional Unix environment is a CLI (command line interface), where you type commands to tell the computer what to do. That is faster and more powerful, but requires finding out what the commands are." -- from man intro(1)

The wiki page has a list of the most used commands (like how to change or list a directory, copy or remove files, but also explains how to find commands and how the manual works.

Here is a list of Bash commands but most of us will probably not know them all ;)

Answer 3

It means you have to open a command line. It's a little window with a cursor where you can type commands. Since I can't post images yet, here there is a link with a picture of a terminal in Linux:

Terminal Picture

In Windows language, a terminal could be when you click on start->run command and then you type cmd.

In Linux you can do basically everything with the terminal, and personally I suggest you to get used to it and not to be scared of it. It is SUPER useful, especially when your desktop environment dies and there is no way to restart it again graphically.

HOpe this answers your question :P

Answer 4

The following are the same:

• Open a Terminal
• Open a Console
• Open a Virtual Terminal

They refer to what is commonly known as THE TERMINAL!! which looks somethings like this:

This terminal which is opened in Ubuntu by pressing CTRL+ALT+T is the opposite of a GUI Which is a Graphical User Interface and it normally does not use a pointing devices like a mouse. It is commonly used with only the keyboard or a keyboard like interface. You type in the terminal what is called a command to tell the terminal to do something and it replies with an output depending on what you told the terminal. In the image above I used the command ls to tell the terminal to "List" all the files in my current directory.

If I used the cd which is short for "Change Directory" I would change my current directory to another directory that I had added after the cd command. For example cd Downloads would take me to the Downloads directory.

Now in your case, cd is just used to take you to another directory where you downloaded and maybe decompressed already a file you downloaded.