Friday, April 24, 2009

Terminator - A Killer Application For Command Warfare (Work)!

The T-800 Terminator is menacing, fierce, and get's the job done. The goto workhorse for Skynet because, let's face it, The T-800 get's the job done and evil robots don't have much time to waste. Anyone who uses Linux on the regular knows that when it comes to getting the job done, nothing gets down like the terminal. What can't you do at the terminal? Yes, we live in the microwave age where everyone wants everything in 2 seconds, and we are spoiled with GUIs and Windows doing everything for us. But nothing is quite as good as getting down to the nitty gritty of the command line interface regardless of the operating system that you may be using. Although, I do highly recommend that you use Linux, Ubuntun (http://www.ubuntu.com) in particular for your casual and serious computing needs. Yes, you could forsake the terminal these days if you are a Linux user, and as for Windows, most people's eyes glaze over when you ask them about the command prompt, the usual response to the inquiry is "what's that?"

Terminator, is a cross-platform GPL terminal emulator. In simple terms, this is an alternative tool for access the terminal (aka command line interface, aka cli). This little applicaiton is very powerful. You have the normal features like cut & paste, and tab functionality. But Terminator shines in allowing you to split the terminal window into separate horizontal or vertical sections within the main terminal window. Please see the screenshots below.

1. This is a picture of Terminator, nothing much going on here.



2. Below is a picture of Terminator with 3 separate panes performing several task. In the top pane, I'm running the "top" command to view the running processes on my computer; in the bottom left pane, I'm running a "ping" to the default gateway address on my computer; in the bottom right pane, I just ran "sudo apt-get install traceroute" to install the traceroute application for use within the terminal.



This is one of the first applications that I install whenever I'm installing Ubuntu for the first time. You can get the application through a variety of ways.

*** Please note that drilldown means to clip through drop-down menus in a GUI (Graphical User Interface). Please see the wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill_down for a more detailed explination of the term. ***

1. You can simply drilldown to Sysetm > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager to launch the Synaptic Package Manager application. And do a search for Terminator, then check the package to install the application. Below is a screenshot of the Synaptic Package Manager which provides a GUI for installing software packages (but it also has many other features which I will not discuss at this time).



2. You can also install Terminator from the command line by typing the following command:

sudo apt-get install terminator

If you have to use the terminal in Linux, then you definitely have to use Terminator as your terminal tool to navigate through the depths of your Linux system. I highly recommend this application, it is like a swiss army knife of tools to have if you are a Linux user. What are you waiting for, you need to sudo apt-get install terminator immediately!

To find out more information about Terminator, and using the terminal in Linux, visit the following links:
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Posted by eha1990 at 2:05 AM

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