In the early 770 and N800 days, with OS2005, 2006 and 2007, the tablets came without a terminal applet by default. Users who wanted one had to download it and install it, then fight to become root, etc.

The "osso-xterm" made available by the maemo team was barebones, but open, and it was heartily hacked by the community. There was a flurry of variants available over the last two years : tabs, command-line parameters (to launch scripts), color output... I think there even was a transparent one at some point. The latest versions were quite useful, especially the nice configurable sidebar for special keys and combos.

Then OS2008 came out, and behold, osso-xterm as bundled out of the box... only, instead of bundling the existing one, Nokia went and made their own version that's not nearly as good.

For starters, it doesn't even close properly. Nor does it open properly when launching a script as a parameter (two windows, etc.). The sidebar has become a bottom bar, wasting precious vertical space and not as easy to customize nor as versatile as the old one (eg for "screen" commands)... and even on a N810, it doesn't give much more screen real estate than on a 770/N800 with the virtual keyboard, because of all the space wasted by useless status bars.

(also, the shell doesn't understand the "clear" command anymore, but I guess that isn't xterm's fault :-)

When I fist saw that mess, I thought "boy, this is gonna get replaced by something more reasonable real fast !"... but it's been months, and if such a replacement exists, I certainly haven't found it...

I'm surprised no one has been irritated enough to fix it. Am I missing something obvious, or are all such community projects dead ?


PS: I realize I hadn't created a new thread in *ages*... this new anti-duplicate gizmo is really neat ! :-)

Good point; I think development had stagnated on the existing ones, because they worked. The new one came, and no one really feels like going back and starting over on a dead project to fix it. All the people who'd do that are off running Konsole in KDE .
Has anyone tried if any of the old ones still work? I know some Bora software works, but I would expect trouble here.

They're GUI, they wont work. Period.

I guessed it was so.
And my favorite, one with a "floating keyboard" for input, never had source posted... I'll have to hunt the author down and threaten to sic the FSF on him if he doesn't port it to OS2008.

Damn, so this is all penguinbait's fault ? :-)

Sad sate of affairs, really...

Even if Maemo is mostly open-sorced I think it's just Nokia worying about software copyright violations so thay limited the app on it's capabilitys.
But i agree, the app really needs improvment.

Erm, no.

It's Nokia's ******ed UI specs that manage to ruin most of the applications they decide to bundle.

+1 - you're not the only one who thinks this about os2008's osso-xterm... it's a *downgrade* over any os2007 version....

<sigh> i can't really complain though... at least it's better than nothing?

(but i would dearly love a true X environment on the NIT, even if we only had rxvt)....

LOL

Not to sound like a broken record, but it is no trouble to get a terminal working. The real problem is getting it to work with the Nokia virtual keyboard. Unless the app used gtk you will not get input. So that leaves a lot of terms out right there. You *used* to be able to use xkbd but with OS2008, that is out of the question. Again, this is a maemo design decision. I do understand the reasoning but I really don't like the result.

I can put xkbd right next to hildon input method and it is by far a superior layout (which you can change by editing a text file). I would be happy if nokia's virtual keyboard was so easily manipulated (maybe it is, I couldn't find anything).

I really like my N800, but I find some of the design decisions so frustrating. What gets to me is how much *could* be done but I feel so locked out.

I would like to see a better term for my n800 too. I use term a lot and I would like to see one with a vertical shortcut bar, where I could place more complicated shortcuts. The horizontal bar only eats up valuable screen space.