Installing Gnu Screen on your Western Digital Mybook World Edition

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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

  • The Man Page: http://man.linuxquestions.org/?query=screen&section=0&type=2
  • Gnu page: http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/
  • Savanah Page: https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/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