I was recently trying to answer a question on a different forum and needed to load a file and run some unix commands (using x terminal). I thought my N800 would be perfect so I downloaded the file tried passing the file through od. I got the error "-sh: od: not found"

I though od was a part of the shell. Do I need to download it? Does it need enabling? is it a permissions thing? is there a way of getting all the basic unix stuff?


I have an N800 with OS2008 version (I believe )

A regular Linux system will use Bash for the shell, and the GNU coreutils package provides most of the common utilities (including od). The tablets use the lightweight BusyBox instead of a typical Linux shell and utilities.

Judging by the documentation, BusyBox can include od, but not as compiled for the tablet.

Thanks for that. Is there a way of loading up (via apt-get perhaps) a more complete shell (bsh, csh, ksh etc) or would that be too large for the N800?

Application manager here definitely offers to install e.g. bash.
(I have extras and extras-devel repositories enabled.)

I tried the maemo download site - couldn't find bash (or anything like it). Could you explain exactly (I'm a simpleton) how I get it?

You can file an enhancement request for enabling od in busybox. The "embedded" version (ie without DESKTOP features enabled) is really tiny and doesn't interact with anything else so it could be accepted.

It's not just od! I'd expect all the simple commands to be present unless they take up way too much room compared to their usefulness.

I use my N800 mostly for browsing the web at which it's superb. I'll admit I bought it for skype video but that's just me being bitter and twisted. But it's great having a unix shell available to me in my pocket so I can run anything - it just came as a bit of a shock that it's only a bit of a shell.

A lot of them are. Look around /bin and /usr/bin, and run "busybox --help" to see what busybox already provides.

What other commands are you missing specifically?