Terminal Emulator and Virtual Terminal

Terminal Emulators

When using a graphical user interface, we need another program called a terminal emulator to interact with the shell. If we look through our desktop menus, we will probably find one. KDE uses konsole and GNOME uses gnome-terminal, though it’s likely called simply “terminal” on our menu. There are a number of other terminal emulators available for Linux, but they all basically do the same thing; give us access to the shell. You will probably develop a preference for one or another based on the number of bells and whistles it has.

The Console Behind The Curtain

Even if we have no terminal emulator running, several terminal sessions continue to run behind the graphical desktop. Called virtual terminals or virtual consoles,
these sessions can be accessed on most Linux distributions by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 through Ctrl+Alt+F6. When a session is accessed, it presents a login prompt into which we can enter our username and password. To switch from one virtual console to another, press Alt and F1-F6. To return to the graphical desktop, press Alt-F7.

练习

tom登陆系统，Ctrl+Alt+F2 切换到tty2 jerry登陆，Ctrl+Alt+F3切换到tty3 spike登陆，startx启动图形窗口，打开terminal，最后tuffy用putty登陆。

login as: tuffy
tuffy@192.168.1.128's password:
Last login: Thu Mar 15 15:13:04 2018
[tuffy@localhost ~]$ who
tom      tty1         2018-03-15 15:18
jerry    tty2         2018-03-15 15:18
spike    tty3         2018-03-15 15:19
spike    pts/0        2018-03-15 15:21 (:0)
tuffy    pts/1        2018-03-15 15:23 (192.168.1.123)
[tuffy@localhost ~]$ loginctl
   SESSION        UID USER             SEAT
         3       1002 jerry            seat0
         7       1004 tuffy
         5       1003 spike            seat0
         2       1001 tom              seat0

4 sessions listed.
[tuffy@localhost ~]$ 

tty（teletpye）是virtual terminal or virtual console ，pts（pseudo terminal）是 termianl emulator。

http://linuxcommand.org/index.php
http://billie66.github.io/TLCL/book/index.html