Midnight Commander

Midnight Commander (mc), is a two pane interactive filebrowser that can run in a text console. It is a clone of the honorable and venerable Norton Commander and includes a simple text editor and network connectivity.

Some users have reported difficulty with this approach, but it has been used successfully by pvh on both Unslung5.5 and Unslung6.8b.

1- Install Midnight Commander.

This will also install a ncurses ipkg by default.

  ipkg install mc

Unslung5.5 Note:

If you have upgraded busybox, installing MC will fail due to Busybox 1.0 providing clear and reset, two commands also provided by ncurses (a dependency of mc). There is a workaround at Wget?.

2- Configure the terminal.

Edit or create /etc/profile to set up your terminal settings. NOTE - the file does not exist by default. Add these lines to the file:

  export TERMINFO=/opt/share/terminfo
  export TERM=xterm-pcolor

Explore the /opt/share/terminfo directory to try other terminal configurations.

Unslung6.8 Note:

The first export line should be /opt/lib/terminfo instead of /opt/share/terminfo. If MC is unresponsive at startup and terminates with a memory exhausted message upon keypress, you may need to

  chmod 640 /etc/profile

3- Launch the Program (mc).

It should work via ssh or telnet from a linux machine or through PuTTY?.

Note: If you get the following error...

"mc: error while loading shared libraries: libext2fs.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" ... you should install e2fsprogs

  ipkg install e2fsprogs

4- Troubleshooting.

Some keyboard keys might not work initially. These can be retrained by using the Options->"Learn Keys" menu.
If your function keys are not working, either use the mouse to do this, or use <ESC><NUMBER> to emulate them. For example, to retrain the keys, press <ESC><9>, select "OPTIONS", and then "LEARN KEYS". -Wibble