A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term terminal covers all remote terminals, including graphical interfaces. A terminal emulator inside a graphical user interface is often called a terminal window.
VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) is a VESA standard, currently at version 3, that defines the interface that can be used by software to access compliant video boards at high resolutions and bit depths. This is opposed to the "traditional" INT 10h BIOS calls, which are limited to resolutions of 640×480 pixels with 16 colour (4-bit) depth or less. VBE is made available through the video card's BIOS, which installs during boot up some interrupt vectors that point to itself.
The Linux framebuffer (fbdev) is a linux subsystem used to show graphics on a computer monitor, typically on the system console.
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and predated the use of a computer screen by decades.
One meaning of system console, computer console, root console, operator's console, or simply console is the text entry and display device for system administration messages, particularly those from the BIOS or boot loader, the kernel, from the init system and from the system logger. It is a physical device consisting of a keyboard and a screen, and traditionally is a text terminal, but may also be a graphical terminal. System consoles are generalized to computer terminals, which are abstracted respectively by virtual consoles and terminal emulators. Today communication with system consoles is generally done abstractly, via the standard streams, but there may be system-specific interfaces, for example those used by the system kernel.
Fast user switching is a feature of a multi-user operating system which allows users to switch between user accounts without quitting applications and logging out.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like GUIs, they may use the entire screen area and accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using special graphical characters such as ┌ and ╣, referred to in Unicode as the "box drawing" set. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a character set; at the same time, contrasted to all points addressable (APA) mode or other kinds of computer graphics modes.
Windows Console is the infrastructure for console applications in Microsoft Windows. An instance of a Windows Console has a screen buffer and an input buffer. It allows console apps to run inside a window or in hardware text mode. The user can switch between the two using the Alt+↵ Enter key combination. The text mode is unavailable in Windows Vista and later. Starting with Windows 10, however, a native full-screen mode is available.
ANSI.SYS is a device driver in the DOS family of operating systems that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape sequences. It is partially based upon a subset of the text terminal control standard proposed by the ANSI X3L2 Technical Committee on Codes and Character Sets.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates the machine's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display. DRM was first developed as the kernel-space component of the X Server Direct Rendering Infrastructure, but since then it has been used by other graphic stack alternatives such as Wayland and standalone applications and libraries such as SDL2 and Kodi.
The magic SysRq key is a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low-level commands regardless of the system's state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem. Its effect is similar to the computer's hardware reset button but with many more options and much more control.
A virtual console (VC) – also known as a virtual terminal (VT) – is a conceptual combination of the keyboard and display for a computer user interface. It is a feature of some Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, BSD, illumos, UnixWare, and macOS in which the system console of the computer can be used to switch between multiple virtual consoles to access unrelated user interfaces. Virtual consoles date back at least to Xenix and Concurrent CP/M in the 1980s.
A multiseat, multi-station or multiterminal system is a single computer which supports multiple independent local users at the same time.
General Graphics Interface (GGI) was a project that aimed to develop a reliable, stable and fast computer graphics system that works everywhere. The intent was to allow for any program using GGI to run on any computing platform supported by it, requiring at most a recompilation. GGI is free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the MIT License.
A headless computer is a computer system or device that has been configured to operate without a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. A headless system is typically controlled over a network connection, although some headless system devices require a serial connection to be made over RS-232 for administration of the device. Headless operation of a server is typically employed to reduce operating costs.
VGA text mode was introduced in 1987 by IBM as part of the VGA standard for its IBM PS/2 computers. Its use on IBM PC compatibles was widespread through the 1990s and persists today for some applications on modern computers. The main features of VGA text mode are colored characters and their background, blinking, various shapes of the cursor, and loadable fonts. The Linux console traditionally uses hardware VGA text modes, and the Win32 console environment has an ability to switch the screen to text mode for some text window sizes.
A terminal multiplexer is a software application that can be used to multiplex several separate pseudoterminal-based login sessions inside a single terminal display, terminal emulator window, PC/workstation system console, or remote login session, or to detach and reattach sessions from a terminal. It is useful for dealing with multiple programs from a command line interface, and for separating programs from the session of the Unix shell that started the program, particularly so a remote process continues running even when the user is disconnected.
Kmscon is a virtual console that runs in userspace and intends to replace the Linux console, a terminal built into the Linux kernel. Kmscon uses the KMS driver for its output, it is multiseat-capable, and supports internationalized keyboard input and UTF-8 terminal output. The input support is implemented using X keyboard extension (XKB). Development of Kmscon stopped in March 2015. There was a successor project called systemd-consoled, but this project was also later dropped in July 2015.
