This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of multi-agent systems with general continuoustime linear dynamics for both the cases without and with a leader whose control input might be nonzero and time varying. For the case without a leader, based on the relative output information of neighboring agents, two types of distributed adaptive dynamic consensus protocols are proposed, namely, the edgebased adaptive protocol which assigns a time-varying coupling weight to each edge in the communication graph and the node-based adaptive protocol which uses a time-varying coupling weight for each node. These two adaptive protocols are designed to ensure that consensus is reached in a fully distributed fashion for all undirected connected communication graphs. It is shown that the edge-based adaptive consensus protocol is applicable to arbitrary switching connected graphs. For the case where there exists a leader whose control input is possibly nonzero and bounded, a distributed continuous adaptive protocol is designed to guarantee the ultimate boundedness of the consensus error with respect to any communication graph which contains a directed spanning tree with the leader as the root and whose subgraph associated with the followers is undirected, requiring neither global information of the communication graph nor the upper bound of the leader's control input. A distributed discontinuous protocol is also discussed as a special case. Simulation examples are finally given to illustrate the theoretical results. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.