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 BEWARE it is also possible to delete your data, so be careful. And if you become the root user, you have full control of the computer and 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

When you start Terminal, it runs the Bash "shell" program that interprets keystrokes and commands. Its main job is to allow you to run other programs, for example:

• 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.

There are hundreds of Linux commands available in the Terminal, Linux software describes some more of them. The OLPC system software on the XO is a slimmed-down version of Fedora and so its command-line programs come from Fedora. Many command-line programs from Fedora are not available but experienced users can add them using yum or rpm.

Users and super-user

Initially Terminal connects to your computer as the default user (usually "olpc", perhaps "liveuser" on a Live CD). Some programs require that you run them as the root "super-user. You can prepend sudo to these, or press the #_ icon in the Activity menu to become root, or enter su -l to become root. To repeat, the root user has awesome destructive power, do run commands as root unless you have to.

Copy and paste in Terminal

• Use the Edit menu
• Press Shift+Ctrl+C to copy, Shift+Ctrl+V to paste. (You have to hold the shift key down in addition because Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V are meaningful key combinations in terminal programs.)
• Plug a three-button mouse into a USB port and use the middle mouse button to paste.
• Click both buttons below the XO-1's track pad (or click directly between them) to paste.

You can select text in Terminal's window and use the last technique to duplicate it without first copying it to the Sugar clipboard.

Paste script

(This is more relevant to earlier releases where copy and paste did not work in Terminal.

You can create a command-line script named paste to paste text from the clipboard into Terminal. To create this using the nano text editor, enter

 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

Other keystroke commands

Keyboard shortcuts lists special keys in Sugar. Some of these don't work in Terminal, or require that you press the Shift key as well.

Change font size in the Terminal activity

To increase the print size in 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—see Fonts for info on determining available fonts).

• Press Control+X and answer Yes to save.
• Stop the Terminal activity (the stop-sign icon in the top right-hand corner of the Activity menu)
• Re-open Terminal, the terminal should now be in a larger font.

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 terminal 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 ().

Logging in to the console

In "Ship.1" releases (builds 650, 653, and 656), the console may give you a login prompt and require you to login before you can enter commands. If so, type root and press the Enter key,

xo-NN-NN-NN login: root

In more recent builds both virtual terminals log you in as root after you first press Enter.

You are now logged in as the root user, be careful.

Changing font size in the console

To increase the font size in the console, type:

setfont sun12x22

For a list of other console fonts, look in /lib/kbd/consolefonts/ and type:

ls /lib/kbd/consolefonts/*.psfu.gz

(remove the suffix .psfu.gz when used with the 'setfont' command)

For a permanant change, edit the line:

" ro ${ROOTDEV} console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0 fbcon=font:sun12x22" expand$ to boot-file 

in /boot/olpc.fth and substitute your font choice for sun12x22.

Alternative terminal program

You can install gnome-terminal:

su -l
yum install gnome-terminal

Use an existing terminal session to launch a 'gnome terminal' session.

See also

• Linux software A brief description of some of the linux software that is installed with Sugar.
• BASH Reference A longer list of commands and programs (many are not installed on the XO-1 by default due to its constrained storage.