8.2 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 a CentOS 8 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 CentOS 8”. 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.