Terminal Activity

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

The Terminal is an Activity that allows you to control your XO directly from a command line, similar to the Terminal program in Mac OS X or the Command Prompt in 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 be careful.

BEWARE: If you become user "root" by executing "su -l " you have full control — you can 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.

Starting a console

You can also access a Linux command prompt by switching to the console, instead of starting the Terminal activity.

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.

You can find Keyboard Shortcuts and the keyboard illustrated here.

There are hundreds of Linux commands available in the Terminal, Linux software describes some more of them. The core Linux distribution used on the XO is Fedora.

Copy and Paste into Terminal Window

It is not possible to copy and paste from the Terminal as of build Ship.2 (the version all G1G1 donors received). 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 is possible in Update.1, but DnD does not work in Terminal.activity (Trac #5376) .

There is a partial work-around for this problem, using the third button of a mouse. See Scroll-Wheel Copy and Paste. That page also has instructions to make the right touchpad button act like the third button of a mouse.

Paste script

You can create a script that pastes text from the clipboard into Terminal.

Open a terminal and create a new file named paste in the home directory, this can be done with nano for example.

   nano paste

In the file enter the following

   #!/usr/bin/python
   import pygtk
   import gtk
   cb = gtk.clipboard_get(selection = "PRIMARY")
   print cb.wait_for_text()

Save and exit, then make the file executable by entering

   chmod a+x paste

Finally to run the script to paste from the clipboard enter

   ./paste

Change font size in the Terminal Activity

Here is how to increase the print size in the terminal:

• Launch the Terminal activity.
• Type

nano ~/.sugar/default/terminalrc

• Find the line saying

Font = Monospace 8

And change it to

Font = Monospace 16

(or whatever you want).

• Press Control-X and answer Yes to save.
• Close the terminal activity (the X in the top right-hand corner)
• Re-open the terminal activity, the terminal should now be in larger print.

The Console

Another way to bring up the Linux command prompt is by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Neighborhood keys at the same time (the Neighborhood view key is represented by a circle with 8 small dots ). This will switch to a console that runs outside the Sugar UI and X Window System. The console also displays some internal messages during XO operation. (Note that many Sugar binding are not available in the console, so commands such as sugar-control-panel will not work there.)

To return to the X Window System environment, press Ctrl+Alt+Home keys ().

There is a second terminal (technically, /dev/tty2) outside Sugar that you can switch to by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Group keys ().

Changing font size in the console

To increase the font size in the console, type:

setfont sun12x22

Cutting and Pasting

Using build 650

It is not possible to cut and paste from the terminal to other activities. However you can use the the clipboard function (i.e., to cut and paste) to drop text into a terminal if you attach a 3 button USB mouse to your USB port. After you have copied text from the web page(usually Ctl C), switch to the Terminal activity, put your cursor on the command line and click your middle button. Doing that should cause the text to be copied successfully.

Isn't it possible to configure the X Server so that the "double chord" of pressing the left and the right mouse button at the same time, emulate the middle mouse button? But even simpler would be to use the right mouse button for pasting since it is not currently used in the terminal. -- Dov Grobgeld - 2008-01-23

Also try "CTRL+SHIFT+V" for paste.

gnome-terminal

Chew up some of that precious nand and install gnome-terminal so you can paste those long strings into a shell:

su -1
yum install gnome-terminal

See Also

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