Saturday, April 10, 2010

Nokia N900 guide: nano text editor

Everytime I install a new Linux distro, the first thing that I look for is my beloved "nano" text editor. I know "vi" just enough to be able to insert, delete, save and exit but I just can't be productive without nano!

N900 of course comes with vi but it took me a while to get nano installed on it. At first I went to official nano site but couldn't find any binaries for ARM. I found one for Ubuntu but apparently that was incompatible with the Maemo5. Then I found this Maemo wiki page and immediately followed the instructions to add the fremantle/tools repository. To my disappointment, there was still no sign of nano in the App Manager even after numerous refreshes.

So I slided out the N900 keyboard, went to the terminal and fired away the following commands:
root
apt-get update
apt-get install nano

It asked me to install libncurses as well. Fine! Just gimme nano!

And now I can be productive again. Beautiful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am using nano in ubuntu 9.10 but in writing c programs the systax highlighting feature is not functioning ...what is the problem.

http://wwww.sudobits.com

S said...

Check if you have a /usr/share/nano/c.nanorc and the relevant include statement in /etc/nanorc is uncommented.