Dear all,
what's the difference between terminal and terminal emulator? In what occasion I should use either one not the other one?

regards,
ethereal1m

In most circumstances, you can consider them the same thing in the sense that what you can do with one you do with the other.

More technically, consider the text-prompt you get when no graphical environment whatsoever is running to be a terminal. When you launch konsole (as just one example) from within KDE, Gnome or whatever it is a terminal emulator.

Like I said: in most cases. There are exceptions, and one that springs to mind is when you want to modify _some_ configuration files or cache-directories you need to use the "real" terminal but those cases are rare in my experience.

There are two terminal applications in my loaded KDE (4.3), Terminal (Terminal Emulator) and Konsole (Terminal). And you are saying that Konsole is "terminal emulator". So both of them are terminal emulator (I assume they are since they are called under KDE)? I'm confuse.

In this case, I don't think there is really any difference as those are just descriptions. You probably have a program called "Terminal" which has for its comment or description "Terminal Emulator", while the program Konsole is using "Terminal" for its comment. Terminal - the program, is very similar to Konsole (both being graphical utilities for running a command prompt), but is part of XFCE's collection of utilities.

You can always try launching the two, do a little comparison, and see which one you prefer.

yeah, that's what I thought....