Graphical Shell with ajaxPHPterm

This article will allow you to use your web browser on your Pre for a terminal using thttp-php and ajaxphpterm. You should have already accessed linux on your Pre and installed an SSH server, and enabled sudo.

1. SSH into your Pre.

2. Install php-thttpd root@castle:/# /opt/bin/ipkg-opt install php-thttpd

3. Configure php-thttpd root@castle:/# cat > /opt/etc/thttpd.conf dir=/ port=8080 user=root chroot nosymlink novhost logfile=/opt/var/log/thttpd.log

4. Configure php-thttpd service root@castle:/# cat > /etc/event.d/optware-thttpd description "thttpd Daemon for WebOS" author "Danny Clark" version 1.0

start on stopped finish stop on runlevel [!2]
 * 1) don't start until the WebOS finishes it's normal boot
 * 2) that way no delay is added to the GUI startup

exec /opt/sbin/thttpd -C /opt/etc/thttpd.conf -D respawn
 * 1) run the daemon

5. Download and install ajaxPHPterm. Note thttpd requires php files to be mode 644 and executable files to be 755; change permissions where needed after the install. cd /opt/share/www wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ajaxphpterm/ajaxphpterm.zip unzip ajaxphpterm.zip rm ajaxphpterm.zip

6. Restart thttpd-php /sbin/initctl stop optware-thttpd /sbin/initctl start optware-thttpd

7. Open up the pre's web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/opt/share/www/ajaxphpterm/index.php

This needs verification, and probably more detail in some places (it's working on my device, but text is mostly from IRC conversation).

This is obviously not that secure at all. For one thing, if you change your firewall rules device is wide open. But it's the first way I've found to get access to a local shell that works enough to enter commands and get results (Graphical_Shell_with_WebShell doesn't work for me for some reason).

This procedure, or just rooting your pre and installing stuff, may cause some rooted-pre-issues; read that page to see if those would be acceptable trade-offs to you.

The display size can be made more sensible by adding the following in the head section of index.php: 

Also note that the "cd" command does not work (I think because the shell commands are executed one at a time, eg in separate processes for each command line followed by a return), but you can access and run files in any path - just treat the command line like shell commands in a GNU Make file :-)

Since the shell is so limited and does not support curses / ncurses or any other kind of full screen mode, it's best used just to execute scripts that have been previously created or modified with a text-editor.