Amiga 500 Terminal emulation

Feeling nostalgic about your old Amiga?
It was my first contact with a command line interface (CLI), even before that dark MS-DOS thing come around into our lives, and made me addicted to it until the time being. Amiga CLI was colorful and cheerful, basically feeling our technology eager spirits with blue, white, black and orange rainbow…

So answering the question I self posed: Yes I do feel nostalgic.

Thus I messed up a bit with my terminal configuration, bashrc and DIR_COLORS to get me a feel of that remote times. So this is what I came up with:

Case 1: Tweaking a X terminal

1) I use the Terminator as terminal – It’s an enhanced version of Gnome’s Terminal, allowing to divide the screen in multiple sections among other extra features. One of them is the possibility of selecting the cursor color, where in Gnome Terminal the cursor is of the same color as the text (so far).

2) Edit .config/terminator/config and added another profile entry (in this case I replaced the default):

[profiles]
  [[default]]
    palette = "#2e3436:#cc0000:#4e9a06:#c4a000:#0050a0:#75507b:#06989a:\
#d3d7cf:#555753:#f08000:#8ae234:#fce94f:#729fcf:#ad7fa8:#34e2e2:#eeeeec"
    use_system_font = False
    cursor_color = "#f08000"
    foreground_color = "#ffffff"
    scroll_on_output = False
    font = Bitstream Vera Sans Mono Bold 10
    background_color = "#0050a0"
    allow_bold = False
    scrollback_infinite = True

3) Changed my $PS1 in my (global) bashrc:

PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\w>\[\033[00m\] '

4) Tweaked the /etc/DIR_COLORS, letting:

DIR 01;33       # directory
LINK 00;30      # symbolic link.  (If you set this to 'target' instead of a
                    # numerical value, the color is as for the file pointed to.)

And that was it!
However, there’s something that keeps bothering me… Vi colors now have to be fixed, specially because comments are of the same color as the background (snap!) Soon as I got them fixed, I’ll edit this post. meanwhile started using nano once again.

Case 2: AmigaSHELL: Amiga emulation on Framebuffer

If you want a more true feeling of the old amiga shell, you can use AmigaShell(tm). Check the page and follow the instructions, pretty simple.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 8:43 am and is filed under HowTos & Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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