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After booting linux in purly command line mode how can I open an application eg web browser or Libra Office?

For example if I use the command "play" with any audio file it starts to play it. I want to know commands for other applications

marko
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Taimour
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  • You don't "open" applications on the command line, you "run" them. And most web browsers or LibreOffice need a destop, or at least an X11 environment. So start your X11 server with `startx` – Basile Starynkevitch Feb 09 '14 at 17:51

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You have to start an X Window session before you can open those applications because they depend on it to render the GUI. To do this you can use the startx command.

There is a good description here on how to use startx.

However, doing it this way can be a lot of manual and tedious work. That's why most linux distros have packaged full window managers like Gnome, Xcfe, etc for you to install with a single command. If what you really want is a minimal one you might look at Fluxbox or Openbox. You can learn a lot about the guts of X by installing and configuring them on your own.

I suspect what you may really need is just to edit text files and get resources from the internet while logged into a Linux box that is command line only. If so, you can check out these command line only tools.

  • Lynx command line browser
  • WGet internet file retriever
  • EMacs text editor
  • Vim text editor
jeremyjjbrown
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