OpenMoko Neo1973 Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Terminal

GNU/Linux developers always feel comfortable when there is a command line! But a command line is not for everyone. Normally we are a lot more productive using a command line, but we need to remember a lot more as well, which is one of the main benefits of the graphical user interfaces!

The Terminal application within OpenMoko (the program name is XnullXXnullXprogramsapplications (application)programsbuttons (button)programsfiles (file)programspaths (path)programsprograms (program)programsmenus (menu)XnullXprogramsprogramsgtkterm2) is a standard X window system terminal where users can enter GNU/Linux commands and directly start OpenMoko applications (e.g., openmoko-dialer) from the command line. To start the terminal application, select the Terminal item from the Main Menu.

Control characters and backspaces appear as empty boxes on the screen which needs some termcap tuning. Remote shells are just fine. A quick fix to remove the empty boxes is to hide the keyboard and then to make it appear again (e.g., by cycling through other applications), or a simple Ctrl-L. The backspaces then have their effect!

Because an embedded system like OpenMoko needs to be very memory efficient the basic set of GNU/Linux commands needs to be very efficiently implemented. BusyBox provides a full suite of common GNU/Linux commands, but implemented as a single program, and generally with fewer of the not so common options for each of the programs. Each program will usually work in much the same way as the full GNU/Linux counterpart. Programs include: ash (the shell), date (to display and set the date), ls (to list the contents of a directory), ps (to list the currently running processes), and very many more.

For example, to set the date of the Neo1973 you can:

neo$ date -s 082921182007

setting the date and time to 29 August 2007, 21:18. Be sure to also synchronise this with the time stored in the hardware with:

neo$ hwclock --systohc

We can also use ssh from our USB connected computer to connect to the ssh-server running on the Neo1973. OpenMoko uses the DropBear implementation of ssh.

Programs like rsync are used to copy files to and from the Neo. From the Neo you can also ssh to itself. Note that there is no password for the root user, by default. A good idea to change this.

Figure 16.1: Terminal application.

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