Yakuake is a Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology which makes the console more user friendly. If you need the ability to quickly pull down a console to run a few commands with a keystroke, and then make the console disappear again with another quick keystroke. YaKuake is exactly what you are looking for.

The interface is highly customizable, you can adjust the height, the width, the horizontal position you can change the keyboard shortcuts and make it retract automatically when it looses focus.

It uses the same terminal settings as Konsole and like Konsole it has multiple tabs so you can have more terminals running at the same time. If you exit KDE while YaKuake is still running in the background, it’ll start up automatically when you log back into KDE.

YaKuake is a very simple application, but it’s also very useful. I use it all the time when I want quick access to a terminal to run one or two commands, such as doing an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade, checking a man page to find the proper syntax for a command, or moving a few files around.

In ubuntu you can install YaKuake with a simple command

sudo apt-get install yakuake

YaKuake is released under GPL license and you can get it from the site:

* http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=29153