9.2 Gaining Access to the Shell

From within the GNOME desktop environment, the shell prompt may be accessed from a Terminal window by selecting the Activities option in the top bar, entering Terminal into the search bar and clicking on the Terminal icon.

When remotely logging into an Ubuntu server, for example using SSH, the user is also presented with a shell prompt. Details on accessing a remote server using SSH will be covered in the chapter entitled “Configuring SSH Key-based Authentication on Ubuntu”. When booting a server-based system in which a desktop environment has not been installed, the shell is entered immediately after the user completes the login procedure at the physical console terminal or remote login session.