Home › Blogs › tcblack's blog

Installing Gnu Screen on your Western Digital Mybook World Edition

Submitted by tcblack on Wed, 09/26/2007 - 11:52am
in

There is a comment on Nanalegumene's site which says screen wouldn't work on the mybook so we should use dtach. I found dtach to be inadequate for my needs. So I decided to hack out a way to make it work.
About Screen

How To

Having gotten it working here's what I did (as root).

  1. mkdir /tmp/myfiles # Create a directory under /tmp called 'myfiles'
  2. cd /tmp/myfiles # Change to the directory in order to work there
  3. wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/screen/screen-4.0.2.tar.gz # grab the file
  4. tar -xvf screen-4.0.2.tar.gz # unpack the file
  5. cd /tmp/myfiles/screen-4.0.2 # change into the directory.
  6. ./configure # If you fail to include the "without" statement Time: 1m44.111s
  7. nano pty.c #now you have to edit the pty.c file using your favorite editor. You might have to use vi pty.c if you haven't installed nano. on line 38 it reads # include You have to comment that out by surrounding it with slash star as in: /* # include */. The reason being the make will fail because stropts.h is not included in your /sys directory. By examining the 38th line of pty.c we find that stropts.h is called when HAVE_SVR4_PTYS exists. I don't know how to counteract that another way besides removing that include. (source)
  8. make # Time about 7 Minutes
  9. make install
  10. install -m 644 etc/etcscreenrc /etc/screenrc #you might want to edit /etc/screenrc with your favorite editor.
  11. cp ./screen /bin # I'm not sure why make install didn't install screen somewhere on the path. But running locate didn't find it anywhere but the source directory.

That's it. You now have a functioning terminal multiplexor with all the trimmings.

If you want to skip all this you can download the executable screen and the screenrc file here.

Hat tip to BLFS

Comments

Can you disable compiling

Submitted by Bobby (not verified) on Tue, 10/16/2007 - 9:27pm.

Can you disable compiling HAVE_SVR4_PTYS withthe ./configure --disable-HAVE_SVR4_PTYS ??

I am wondering..

Cheers..

All you can do is try. I

tcblack's picture
Submitted by tcblack on Wed, 10/17/2007 - 8:38am.

All you can do is try.
I compiled it as shown above and that did the trick for me. I'm happy with it as it appears to be working just fine.

Thanks

Submitted by Edouard (not verified) on Tue, 11/20/2007 - 5:00am.

Thanks, your trick works fine on my MyBookWorld as well.

I installed the latest version (4.0.3) you can download here though, just because I like to have the latest version :)

With 4.0.3 you have to comment out the same line in pty.c

screenrc file

Submitted by kernelsandoz (not verified) on Thu, 03/20/2008 - 10:50pm.

"If you want to skip all this you can download the executable screen and the screenrc file here."

Is there a link missing ?

I used optware to install screen, but I would like to get a good .screenrc file

and what is wuff wuff all about ?

thanks for your work on this.

screen is there now

tcblack's picture
Submitted by tcblack on Fri, 03/21/2008 - 3:03pm.

Sorry about that lost link it should be on the post now.
I have no clue what you mean by wuff wuff care to enlighten me?
Feel free to read and delete the README.txt
Put screenrc under /etc and put screen under /bin for a default install.

wuff wuff

tcblack's picture
Submitted by tcblack on Fri, 03/21/2008 - 3:08pm.

never mind on the wuff wuff, I modified it ages ago.
The default bell message sent to the screen is wuff wuff. Yes it's stupid.
change it with vbell_msg [message]
You can learn lots of things by googling: man screen