Please don't mix up the program xterm with the shell applications that run within it. xterm of n900 does indeed support color as can be seen e.g. by running vim . But it is correct that the default shell is busybox which supplies simplified versions of lots of core utilies, which includes ls . To get the "real" ls you need to install coreutils-gnu. See for example:

http://metalab.at/wiki/Hack-A-N900/First_Steps