Primary methods of launching apps
 

This is for school but was wondering what another option is for opening apps in any Linux distro. I have so far are the main menu (applications/places) and the Run Application tool. WHat is another option? Is using the Terminal an option?

You can always open a terminal, type a command and hit the enter key.

"Command" can be soffice (to start up LibreOffice or OpenOffice), firefox (to start Firefox), thuderbird (to start Thunderbird), vi filename to edit a file and so on.

Everything that's on those click-'n'-drool menus? Right click and look at properties for the command that's executed.

Hope this helps some.

Yes, very much and you had offered some amazing info. Thanks for your intelligent input. I had recently migrated to Linux from the slow-you-down Windows OS for my Linux class. I am loving these OSes. Thanks again for your time, energy, assistance and intelligence in this matter.

How would you open System Monitor using Terminal? I have tried systemmonitor system monitor sysmonitor. What am I doing wrong and how to correct this?

When you're running a GUI session, the window-manager (blah blah) is the shell, and when you click on an app icon or specify a program to be run, that "launches an app."

When you're running a web-browser, using FastCGI or CGI, this also is "launching an app." When your program uses fork or exec, that also.

When you use crontab, ditto.

Hi, newbie trying to help :)

Usually if I'm trying to launch something from command line but have no idea what the command is, I'll open it using the usual application menu and take a loop at Help > About. For example, I had no idea that the default 'document viewer' in my old Ubuntu 11.04 is called "evince" (command "evince" launches it from terminal) until I looked at that.

Another choice is to guess the few starting characters and use terminal's tab completion to see if you get lucky. Maybe try "sys" and tab.

It may also be related to what desktop environment you're using. For example, if you're in GNOME the command may be "gnome-" something.

All the best!

One way to try to find the name of the executable is man -k <keyword> and then look at the most promising man pages. For example

Most (all?) desktops have launchers in their panels.

Most (all?) desktops can be configured to autostart applications when the desktop session starts.

Linux has boot scripts which can be used to start applications.

The cron and at daemons can start applications.

Applications can be started from other systems.

"Run program" dialog box. Usually hotkeyed to ALT-F2.

EDIT: I now see that this was mentioned right in the first post. It's early.