hi - having trouble opening/running an app from the terminal. i saw documentation in the Fedora Q&A mentioning just typing the name of the app you wanna run (the example was firefox) and hit enter and it should open. that didn’t work, i tried a few different applications.
i’m sure, given my relative newness to all this, that i’m doing something wrong. but i’m not sure what it is. i feel like this is a fundamental process, so i wanna learn how to do it properly. thank you in advance, and for all the help you all provide
It’s not “the name of the application” but rather “the name of the application’s executable” that you have to type. For example, to run “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, you would enter gimp
. The name-to-executable mapping for most graphical applications can be found in their *.desktop file under the /usr/share/applications directory. For example:
$ grep '^Name=\|^Exec=' /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop
Name=GNU Image Manipulation Program
Exec=gimp-2.10 %U
But firefox
should have worked. What does which firefox
report?
FOXY=`which firefox` && ls -l $FOXY && file $FOXY && rpm -qf $FOXY && unset FOXY
sorry for the delay! and thank you for your response
which firefox reports /usr/bin/firefox
i tried typing just firefox
again and it opened, this time. but there were errors that popped up in terminal, please see screen shot:
Glad you got it working.
As for the “VA” error/warning, VA stands for video acceleration. It is a technology that “offloads” some advanced video processing (e.g. 3D rendering used in video games) to the video card. Without the offloading/acceleration, your PC’s CPU has to do the number crunching and that can be slower because your CPU isn’t optimized for that sort of workload. Everything should still work. But it might be slower depending on what is being processed and how many “spare” cycles your CPU has to do the work. If you need video acceleration, there is some documentation about getting that to work here: Proprietary video codecs are no longer hardware accelerated by default on AMD GPUs since Fedora 37
oohh ok gotcha, thanks for the explanation
i do have a follow up question, though. i use postgresql and i know how to start it and all, but i was curious about how to start pgAdmin from the terminal. i can start it from the GUI of course. and to refer back to the gimp
example, i tried just typing in gimp
and it didn’t work. but i got a message in terminal: Install package 'gimp' to provide command 'gimp'? [N/y]
is this referring to GNU Image Manipulation Program? or something else?
Yes, the gimp package contains the GNU Image Manipulation Program. You can use, e.g., dnf info gimp
to retrieve information about a package before installing it.
… i was curious about how to start pgAdmin from the terminal …
I’m not familiar with pgAdmin. However, you might have luck using something like the following command to search for its executable name.
$ grep '^Name=\|^Exec=' /usr/share/applications/*.desktop | grep -A 1 'Name=.*pg.*'
P.S. If you are looking for a command-line interface for postgresql, sudo -u postgres psql
might be what you are looking for.
thank you again! appreciate the info immensely