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This page has been machine-translated from the original page.

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After updating Kali Linux, pressing Ctrl+Alt+t to launch the terminal started showing the following error.

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Failed to launch preferred application for category

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This time, I’m recording how I fixed the problem above.

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Solution

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I was able to resolve this issue by referring to this Stack Overflow post.

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First, run the following command in the terminal.

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sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator
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Then the following output appears, so choose an appropriate number.

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There are 2 choices for the alternative x-terminal-emulator (providing /usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator).\n\nSelection Path Priority Status\n------------------------------------------------------------\n0 /usr/bin/qterminal 40 auto mode\n* 1 /usr/bin/mate-terminal.wrapper 35 manual mode\n2 /usr/bin/qterminal 40 manual mode\n\nPress <enter> to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 0
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Finally, run the update with apt.

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sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
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This successfully fixed the issue in my environment.

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What this did

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Judging from this Stack Overflow post, this error can occur when there is a problem with a symbolic-link reference.

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So, I used the update-alternatives command to reconfigure the symbolic link.

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sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator
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Looking at the documentation below, you can see that update-alternatives is a command for maintaining the symbolic links that determine which application the OS uses by default.

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Ubuntu Manpage: update-alternatives - maintain symbolic links determining default commands

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On Kali using xfce5, it seems that either qterminal or mate-terminal is used for the default terminal, x-terminal-emulator.

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In this case, I believe the problem was that, for some reason, no terminal was properly associated with x-terminal-emulator, which is what the shortcut key launches.
\nBy the way, --config is an option that lists all available choices.

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Summary

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When this error first appeared, it felt like “my computer broke even though I didn’t do anything,” but in the end I learned quite a bit, so I’m glad I looked into it.

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