charlesleaver.com

So you upgraded to iOS 4.x and now your MobileTer­mi­nal no longer works. It tries to start but imme­di­ately dies. This really upsets you as you find that you fairly fre­quently require it. As a solu­tion you end up with MobileTer­mi­nal 426. This comes as a huge relief, that is until you realise that it’s almost unus­able. If that sounds like the place you’re cur­rently at then stress not. Com­ment 61 at http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/issues/detail?id=172#makechanges includes a link to a fixed pack­age that works exactly how you’d want MobileTer­mi­nal to work, but this time also on iOS 4.x. The com­ment says:

If Allen would like to get MobileTer­mi­nal 426 in Cydia, he should per­son­ally con­tact one of the major repos­i­to­ries, such as Big­Boss, to get it hosted. The repos­i­tory main­tain­ers do not like (nor should they like) work­ing with third par­ties who are try­ing to get stuff hosted, as it means that main­te­nance and other cor­re­spon­dence will be going through some­one largely unin­volved. Please: DO NOT sub­mit MobileTer­mi­nal to Cydia unless you are Allen Porter.

As for the cur­rent MobileTer­mi­nal pack­age in Cydia, it is much more func­tional than revi­sion 426, but does not cur­rently work on iOS 4. What made MobileTer­mi­nal useful/interesting was its intri­cate ges­ture sup­port, allow­ing for mod­i­fiers like con­trol, spe­cial keys like escape, and entire com­mands to be bound to fast move­ments on the screen. MobileTer­mi­nal 426, mean­while, doesn’t even sup­port scrolling the ter­mi­nal screen.

It is there­fore incred­i­bly depress­ing to the core com­mu­nity of users of MobileTer­mi­nal that the devel­op­ment has taken the direc­tion it has: users of the exist­ing copy of MobileTer­mi­nal sim­ply can­not be upgraded to the “lat­est” release, as it frankly is an entirely unre­lated project. It is my per­sonal opin­ion that Allen should have renamed this new ver­sion of MobileTer­mi­nal to some­thing dif­fer­ent, like “MobileTer­mi­nal Redux” or some­thing, to indi­cate this.

Due to this con­fu­sion, when and if MobileTer­mi­nal “426” is released to Cydia, it sim­ply can­not be listed as a direct upgrade to MobileTer­mi­nal “364”. When and if this occurs, the cur­rent “MobileTer­mi­nal” pack­age will be renamed to “MobileTer­mi­nal Clas­sic” or some­thing, but retain its pack­age iden­ti­fier, so exist­ing users can safely con­tinue using it until MobileTer­mi­nal man­ages to regain the func­tion­al­ity that it once had.

Now, it /is/ under­stood that users of MobileTer­mi­nal on iOS 4 cur­rently have issues. How­ever, in the grand scheme of things, not many peo­ple were actu­ally using iOS 4 on jail­bro­ken devices until the very recent jailbreakme.com exploit release last week. In order to main­tain the cur­rent level of func­tion­al­ity for these users, I have been forced (again) to step in and main­tain the old (awe­some) branch of MobileTer­mi­nal. I do not like doing this, and was hop­ing some­one else would step up to the plate, but I will con­tinue to do so until such time as there is a viable replace­ment.

Users who wish to help test this new ver­sion can obtain it at the fol­low­ing direct .deb URL. It should be noted that this revi­sion isn’t quite right on all devices, hav­ing some inter­est­ing visual arti­facts due to the new way in which it is being ren­dered. I believe that this can be fixed, but I may end up push­ing this release any­way with the old binary also included, doing a selec­tion “is the user on iOS 4? ok, then use XXX binary” when the pro­gram is run.

http://apt.saurik.com/debs/mobileterminal_364.3-12_iphoneos-arm.deb

I don’t have to explain how to do any­thing use­ful with this, do I? A “dpkg –i” will end up replac­ing your faulty MobileTer­mi­nal with this work­ing one. Happy happy times!! Thank you so much to Saurik for this!!