Installing Gnu Screen on your Western Digital Mybook World Edition

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 install it

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

  1. Make sure you are in superuser mode

    # wget http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/utilities/screen/screen-4.0.3.tar.gz
    # tar -xvf screen-4.0.3.tar.gz
    # cd screen-4.0.3
    # ./configure
    
  2. 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.

  3. you might want to edit /etc/screenrc with your favorite editor.

    # make
    # make instal
    # install -m 644 etc/etcscreenrc /etc/screenrc
    
  4. 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.

    # cp ./screen /bin
    

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

How To use it

Start putty and login as root.

To start a new screen shell:

# screen -R -D

Screen commands:

[CTRL]-a d          (detach)  Detach screen from this terminal.
[CTRL]-a [CTRL]-k   (kill)    Destroy current window.

Resuming a detached screen session:

# screen -r

Usefull commands:

# screen -list     : prints a list of pid.tty.host strings identifying your screen sessions.
# screen -wipe     : removes destroyed sessions instead of marking them as `dead'.


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