Hello everybody and welcome to this tutorial. Today, I will introduce you to
the Linux terminal and show you some of its basic functionalities. So in Kali
Linux the terminal icon is located in the upper left corner, this black thing, so
just click on it, and there you go. You have the terminal up and running here, by
default it opens up a root terminal in Kali. So if you want to, usually people
want to configure it, but if you don't want to configure anything
else this is perfectly fine. You don't actually need to do anything else.
However, 99% of the time people will configure the terminal to suit their own
needs and purposes. For example, I will always, almost always, increase the font
size so that is it's clear and visible, and that I have a better overview of
what I am doing at the moment. And it also reduces eyestrain according to some
articles. Anyway, just go ahead and right-click anywhere on the terminal
itself, not on the bar but on the terminal itself, and then you have show
menu bar, now we can see it here. Go ahead and click on edit. You can click on
profiles as well and create new profiles here by just clicking
on new, giving it a name, and then configuring it in the preferences.
However, we're going to be configuring the default profile since there really
is no need to create any additional ones. Go ahead and click on profile
preferences, and here you have a great deal of options. One of the first ones
that you will see is that you can use a system fixed width font. So, this is not
good, you see this is very small. I always need to change that. If
that's fine for you you can keep it like that, but I always change it. And I have
mono space 20. If you click on it you can change the font size here, if you wish,
you can change the font that you're using, and that would be it as far as
this place is concerned. You have some other very simple options here...
it says show menu bar by default in new terminals,
I generally click it, I think it's a good idea since you always need to do
something like open up a new tab, or something of a kind, but you don't need
to. You have the cursor shape here it says
block I beam underline, just wanna show you how it looks like, you can view the
terminal as the changes are applied. So you have a block and you have an underline. I
prefer a block, you can use whatever you wish, it will not affect you, it will not
affect you in any technical sense that is. You have title and command. We
don't actually need to change anything there, you can change title if you wish,
we have colors. So, I think that this color scheme is appropriate and fitting
for me, but you can change it any way you like. You can customize it to the point
of extreme. You can change the text color, the background color, you have the
color pallet here, so you can do whatever you want here. You have built-in
schemes, so it says white on black. I can say green on black...
does it have blue on black? Oh,
this is bad...I wouldn't be able to work on this one. So, let's just leave it
on white on black, sorry. This is one of the best
color schemes. Personally, I use on Fedora blue on black but I'm just
gonna leave it as it is here, no need to actually change anything. Now in
background you have three features here, basically. You have a solid
color like this one here that you are seeing, and you can choose a
background image, you can download anything you want from the internet
pretty much, you can configure it to be transparent or image background, and also
you have the ability to have a fully transparent background. And if you click
on transparent background, it's pretty much the same as having a background
image. Except in this case...excellent I'm just gonna configure the transparency
levels and that's pretty good, except in this case your
background image will be your desktop image, pretty much, depending on where
your terminal is. In scrolling, there's an important feature here it's scroll back.
So, you don't want to have 512 lines you want to go ahead and click on unlimited
unless you're severely limited in terms of RAM, and unless you're typing in a
large amount of commands, or something of a kind, but in any case it's better to
have unlimited not only in environments such as these,
but rather instead in cases such as these. You don't need to do anything here
in terms of compatibility. I'm just gonna go ahead and close this and I have
selected a transparent background. And you see this only works for a desktop
image, it doesn't actually show icons, or anything of a kind. If I open up my web
browser it's not gonna show it in the background, it's still gonna keep the
desktop background image, so the desktop wallpaper, should you wish to call it so.
There's a slight delay when it goes about in the update, but it's fine.
It doesn't bother us in the slightest bit. Maybe I will change this later on during
the tutorial, we'll see how I like it, but I just wanted to give you an option so you
can do whatever you want with it. In any case, you can go ahead and click on file
and open tab. I'm just gonna go ahead and open myself four tabs, three new ones, and
one that I already had. So here you can switch in between them, it's very nice,
there are no complications. For example, if I press open up a new
terminal, I have to click here, and then I have to click here, and usually you're
gonna have, I just want to show you what it's like to have four of them. So,
yeah, this is not actually manageable, especially because you don't know what
you are doing on which terminal. People sometimes split their screens into
terminals. I sometimes do that, it's very nice, but we will deal with that a bit
later on when we get into some serious stuff, when we actually need multiple
terminals. But, tabbing these terminals is very
nice, primarily because you can actually see
what you're doing on each one of them in the header. See these things that I'm
selecting, that I'm clicking on now, they're headers of the terminal, or so you
can call them. And if, for example, in this terminal I'm gonna go ahead and say
I want you to go into home, change directory to home, change the working
directory that is, and if I change it here to var, and if I change it here to
var/logs, and if I want to go here to tmp folder, excellent! So, on each of these
tabs in their headers I can see where I am, so this one it's home, this one
is tmp, I don't need to click on it to know. This one is log, so I can know what
I'm doing in every particular terminal, and even though you can have a program
running, or something like that, it's still gonna write it out in the header
and you're gonna get some extra information there. It's very nice, very
useful, and it's gonna help you out a lot as we progress through this course and
as we get into more complicated stuff. Anyway, I just wanted to introduce you to
the Linux terminal. We have done some work with it before during the
installation of VirtualBox, and VirtualBox guest additions, but basically
there I've just given you the command and you're gonna basically just rewrite
it, or copy/paste it, and that's gonna be it, but here I will, in the follow up
tutorial actually, I will start explaining the fundamental Linux
terminal commands, the most common ones, the basic ones, and there you will be
able to see the logic of things and how this Linux terminal works and functions.
Because once you actually learn that, it gives you a huge amount of power. All the
power of the operating system rests on its terminal, because it's a direct
interface to the kernel of the system, and it's a lot faster than the graphical
interface. Now one more key note that I would like to make here, once I teach you
how to use the Linux terminal, and once you get into the habit of typing in commands,
you can use them for a wide variety of purposes. You don't
necessarily need to use these things for pen testing, or something like that, you
can use these commands for network administration, or you can use them in
order to troubleshoot problems with the system, and so on, and so forth. So
you get a far wider spectrum of options in terms of jobs, or something of
a kind, as opposed to just learning something that you can only use for pen
testing and nothing else. In any case, I bid you farewell, and I hope to see you
in the next tutorial.