Terminal Activity

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The Terminal activity grants access to the XO's Linux command line.

The Terminal is a pre-installed Activity that allows you to control your XO directly from a command line, similar to the Terminal program for Mac OSX or the Command Prompt for Microsoft Windows. The Terminal allows you to do far more with your XO than running Sugar activities. But it is also possible to delete your data, and the system data from the command line, so care is needed.

BEWARE: If you become user "root" by executing "su -l " you have full control to destroy all software!

Starting Terminal

The Terminal Activity is found in the Activities taskbar at the bottom of your Home View. You may need to scroll through the Activities taskbar by using the right arrow icon at the bottom of your screen () to find the icon.

Another way to bring up the Linux command prompt is by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Neighborhood keys at the same time. The Neighborhood key is represented by a circle with 8 small dots .

Note: You can find Keyboard Shortcuts and the keyboard illustrated here.

Common Terminal Commands

• sugar-control-panel - Change nickname, XO Color, time zone and other options
• ifconfig - View Wireless Network connections
• nano for editing text files directly. If you want to edit text files in Sugar, use Write.
• yum for automatically installing new software.
• rpm - another way to automatically install new software
• olpc-logbat - log the activity of the battery system. Useful for assisting developers in debugging battery problems.

The core Linux used on the XO is Fedora 7.

Limitations / Known Problems

It is not possible to copy and paste from the Terminal as of Ship.2 (The version all G1G1 donor will receive). So, if you are following some instructions from a web page in the Browse activity, and want to copy them into the Terminal activity, a pen and paper is required unfortunately. Copy/paste, but not Drag-and-Drop, will be possible in Update.1. This has been logged on the dev.laptop.org bug tracking system.

There is a partial work-around for this problem, but it requires an extra USB mouse with a third-button scroll wheel. Description here

See Also

• BASH Reference A longer list of commands that can be used in the Terminal.