Notices

I have seen a number of nice Android devices lately, most with GUIs which are easier to use than N900's Maemo. However, the one thing I love about the N900 Maemo is the terminal emulator support (xterm, CLI, whatever you want to call it).

How would you say the Maemo terminal compares to the Android terminal, in terms of flexibility and usability? Does the Android terminal provide anywhere near the same command line options as the Maemo terminal?

I welcome your thoughts.

Afaik its the opposite , Maemo has a true terminal whereas Android uses emulators. Correct me if I'm wrong

Emulated or not, the real difference is if the Android terminal support multiple shells, and what commands are available in that shell.

The N900 uses Korn shell by default, but support /bin/sh and can be installed with /bin/bash.

Many, MANY CLI applications are installed by default (really useful ones like top are must haves), and many others can be installed (ssh, scp, wget, unzip, etc...).

I don't have an android device so I'd love to hear someone who does chime in on the usefulness of it's terminal.


EDIT: And since Maemo is a Debian based OS, it's terminal allows us full access to install, remove, and update applications using dpkg and apt-get.

I was using android terminal on G1. On stock rom there wasn't many CLI programs. Most basic was missing. Cyanogen mohd ad most nessesary programs. Anyway I was using Debian on my G1 so i could access to bash.

not sure if Android terminal supports this but the terminal and OS on maemo supports X11 forwarding which is a big plus.

On Android, most essential GNU applications are missing, as is the X-server (so no X forwarding). However, the terminal isn't even available on most commercial releases. And root access is only available on, well, rooted devices.

a terminal without root access is really useless....

The terminal IS an emulator, by the by. I think you're confusing the terminal with the shell. There's some FANTASTIC and EXCELLENT terminals for Android and very, very few good terminal emulators on the N900, as near as I can tell. (Certainly nothing than seems to emulate any variety of terminal types.) The stock Android shell is as useless as to be nonexistent for all intents and purposes while a rooted system can have a pretty decent shell and a proper Debian install on Android seems like the kind of shell you're expecting to have for scripting but the Android environment is JUST out of reach of being useful for such scripting. Android+Debian will only just flirt just ever-so-closely on the fringes of what you'd expect with POSIX while the stock N900 sits pretty well on a bash-like shell and if you install bash/korn/etc, you'll end up with full-fledged shells that work as you'd expect a POSIX-like (but still not entirely POSIX, this is Linux after all) system to operate.

All software terminals are emulators. I'm pretty sure Maemo devices don't come with a real VT100 attached ;-)

...and now I'm tempted to drag the vt100 I grew up with out of my parents' attic just to defy this very statement.

Sadly, I haven't much time on my hands, or I'd do it.