Terminals

• terminals have long history
• earlier computing was all based on CLI's

Now you have pseudo terminals. To understand what that means, when you login to your linux machine you are greeted with a login manager(or display manager) where you enter your login details.

But that was not always the case, in this case you already have a X server running which controls the GUI you see on the screen. You switch to another virtual terminal tty. There are 7 loaded by default, and you can switch between them using Ctrl+Alt+no, where no can be anywhere form 1-7.

So for each of these virtual terminal there is process attached with them.

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/149236/look-up-the-device-from-its-tty-file

Now for pseudo terminals, you can set the TERM variable to show the text capabilities it support.

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/920908/what-does-export-term-linux-actually-do-when-inside-a-script

According to GNU gettext manual page, the TERM variable "...contains a identifier for the text window's capabilities". In other words, it just tells the system what kind of terminal you're supposedly using and how the text on screen should be adapted.

TERM=linux means that you're supposedly going to be using Linux console, so the output will be minimalistic, might not have support for some languages.