[Oneiric-Topic] Byobu

Dustin Kirkland kirkland at ubuntu.com
Sat Apr 2 15:14:48 UTC 2011


On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I took your statement of "we'll have almost everything we need." to
> mean, we'll have almost everything we need to make it the default
> terminal shell.

Hey Clint, one important clarification here.  Just need to update the
vocabulary here...

This isn't about byobu as a "default shell".  Byobu/screen is not a
shell itself, but rather a "command line window manager".  It's a
program that runs within a shell, and allows you to launch and manage
dozens (40, by default) of shells within a single user process.

Your default shell is bash, or dash, ash, csh, tsh, ksh, etc. etc.
etc.  All of those do (or at least should -- file bugs if not) work
just fine under Linux.  Ubuntu chooses a default user shell of bash
for you.  There's no intention to change that.

The way "byobu at login" currently works is by adding a line to the
very end of your ~/.profile:
  case "$-" in *i*) byobu-launcher && exit 0; esac;

This says "if the shell being launched is interactive, then run byobu
and exit when byobu is done".  There is always room for improvement
there, and that's part of what a blueprint would design and fix.

Anyway, this is an interesting point in the thread.  I'm going to put
together a blog post that actually walks through all of what happens
when you login into an Ubuntu command line shell, from a low-level
technical perspective ;-)

-- 
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Core Developer




More information about the ubuntu-server mailing list