What to do with xterminal
 

Sometimes I'm using my phone, and I stop and say to myself "holy shat on a hot tin roof, there's a terminal on my phone!" The novelty amuses me, but short of using apt, vim, MC, and the occasional game of unnethack, I rarely use it.

Still though—there's a terminal on my phone. That's so neat.

I've only bricked my n900 once, so obviously I need to start using the command prompt more. What awesome or useful things (preferably both, but awesome and useless is acceptable) can the terminal be used for on the n900? Can I place phone calls with a command? Are there some CLI programs that are simply useful or do something that isn't replicated easily in the GUI?

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

Well, managing packages with apt-get is WAY faster than using any of the GUI tools to download code (even FAM). Running python interactively provides a very fancy pocket calculator. If you install ssh you can log into remote workstations (if that appeals to you). And of course you have access to the usual Unix-style utilities like awk, find, grep et al. which make managing the files on your phone far easier (IMHO) than using any GUI filemanager. You can manually optify things by creating soft links.

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

Some commands to control the phone are in this wiki page :
http://wiki.maemo.org/Phone_control

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

of course you need espeak

You can ssh to a webserver if you want, you can Nano a blogpost, you can get unison binary from debian arm and sync your files from your pc, find some files with find -name whatever.txt, code some python and run it, install php and run a webserver...

if I think of anything else I'll come back. (is there pdftk for arm?)

ah, and imagemagick?

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

awesome

i like being able to "killall" (kills a process by name)
package management from the command line is also a life saver
if you're interested in using the terminal, there's some tricks to making it better, you can change the font color or install a version of ls that supports color, or update busybox... we will have you bricking that n900 again in no time ;)

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

so true, its the best programmable calculator, with all programming and variables.

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

hahahaha - damn man, i'm supposed to be working
espeak "holy shat on a hot tin roof"

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

I use it for ssh, very useful.

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

gcc,g++,sed,grep,awk,find,xargs,dpkg-buildpackage...

The list is long.

Re: What to do with xterminal
 

You can use xterm to learn how Linux works and thus control your device. This is like popping open the hood of your car and finding out what all that stuff does.

You can modify things like the startup video.

You can study computer languages. A good one to start with is awk.