what is the ipython notebook “Terminals” menu option

Question

I am running ipython notebook on my OSX machine and/or my ubuntu 14.04 machine. I am using ipython 3.0.0, and ipython (jupyter) notebooks.

When I start an ipython n

Answer 1

Here's the code in Lib/site-packages/IPython/html/notebookapp.py responsible for this item (located the file by searching the source for "Terminals" case-sensitively):

def init_terminals(self):
    try:
        from .terminal import initialize
        initialize(self.web_app)
        self.web_app.settings['terminals_available'] = True
    except ImportError as e:
        log = self.log.debug if sys.platform == 'win32' else self.log.warn
        log("Terminals not available (error was %s)", e)

As you can see, there should be a message in the console log specifying what went wrong (you may need to increase log verbosity with ipython notebook --log-level= to see it). In my case, it said:

Terminals not available (error was No module named fcntl)

The html.terminal module that is being imported appears to provide a web-based IPython interactive console.