Hello, I got my laptop working with wifi but eventually messed up badly and
now do not have a terminal in my gnome fedora 35 operating system. I do not
know how to download a terminal emulator without a terminal, and do not
know how to reset my computer without a terminal. What should I do in order
to either reset my computer or to download a terminal emulator without a
terminal emulator in this case?
1 Like
Hi Blake! Can you try pressing FN+CTRL+ALT+F5? That should bring you to a virtual terminal emulator built into Linux itself. Just log in with your username and password, and then issue the command to reinstall Fedora’s regular terminal emulator. I don’t use Fedora myself, but I believe something like sudo dnf install gnome-terminal will likely do the trick. When you’re done, pressing FN+CTRL+ALT+F1, F2, or F7 should return you to the graphical environment (the exact number depends on your distribution’s configuration, and I don’t know which one Fedora uses.)
That being said, if your terminal emulator got hosed, there may be more problems waiting ahead, just as a warning. I’ve accidentally deleted parts of my desktop environment before when I was first starting out with Linux, and there tends to be a lot of collateral damage when that happens…
6 Likes
You can type Fn + Ctrl + Alt + F2 or F3 … or Ctrl + Alt + F2 or F3 … on Fn lock (Fn + Esc) to use console on your Gnome login page. See The best practice when facing GDM not starting? - #2 by alan.jelaska - Ask Fedora for detail.
Welcome to the forum, extra info in the title may draw more specific response.
As maybe Blake can not change the title by themselves due to a limitation of the permission, I renamed “Urgent Help” to “Urgent Help: How to use a terminal when terminal is not installed, and reset the computer.”.
3 Likes
These may be things you’ve already tried but just in case they help:
- If your computer is really stuck, you can perform a hard reset by pressing and holding the power button (for something like 10 seconds). That should turn off your computer without intervention by the operating system. If the operating system has left the disk in an inconsistent state, some disk repair may be necessary and theoretically some data loss is a possibility.
- Fedora by default comes with gnome-terminal installed. In Gnome, you can press the “windows” key and then type in “term”. That should get you a terminal.
- As mentioned by others already, a virtual console (CTRL+ALT+F4 or something like that) should work too. Beware that the default fontsize works out to be very small on the native screen, so you may need a magnifying glass. You can configure bigger fonts for the virtual consoles. For such emergencies that’s worth doing in the future.
Yeah, right. Here is a nice thread to know how to change the font on the console: Hwo to increase the size of tty font - Fedora Discussion .
Thank you so much! I downloaded it in the boot engine, will remember this next time!
Out of curiosity how would one delete an icon in the Gnome display? Like when you hit the button that shows all your apps?
This might be a good start:
Entries in Gnome’s application menu come from “*.desktop” entries. If you remove the relevant file, the entry should disappear (on next startup?) However, usually the relevant files would be under control of your package manager, so you’d probably don’t want to remove those files manually. Better to uninstall the relevant application through the normal means.
1 Like