Slashdot Mirror
Smartphones For Text SSH Use — Revisited
jfischet writes "Back in 2005 a Slashdot user asked this question and the responses were helpful — but I'd like to ask again to see what has changed in three years. I'd like to know what this community thinks is the best choice of smartphone for remotely administering Linux/UNIX boxes via SSH."
If you have a Palm OS device (i.e. a Treo), then pssh is still the way to go. Alas no, this solution hasn't changed since 2005...
this guy has a good example http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Putty on a Sony-Ericsson M600i works ok for me, but most of the time, I'd keep the M600i in my pocket and use my Nokia N800 through Bluetooth.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
When I read the headline, I thought "I wonder how long it's going to take for some fanboy to recommend the iPhone, despite the fact that it doesn't have a keyboard & is inferior for text entry compared to say a blackberry, or even some of the HTC monstrosities."
And there you were - right in the first post. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in fanboi nature.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I use Pocket PuTTY. I don't know if it is the perfect answer, but it works for what I do.
When I read the headline, I thought "I wonder how long it's going to take for some fanboy to recommend the iPhone, despite the fact that it doesn't have a keyboard & is inferior for text entry compared to say a blackberry, or even some of the HTC monstrosities."
The iPhone is fine for typing text. And the fully dynamic interface allows for some interesting possibilities for shell control, along with more room for a wider view on the screen. Penny Aracde of course, put it best... "If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses."
Don't be so dismissive until you see what terminal possibilities might arrive with the SDK.
And there you were - right in the first post. Thank you for reaffirming my faith in fanboi nature.
Don't your eyes scratch a lot with that wool you keep pulling over yourself?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've been running one for close to 2 years for just this purpose.
Runs symbian putty perfectly, does 802.11 for when you can get to it, has an ok real web browser, and does real email (imap/pop/smtp).
And on the plus side, actually fits in a pocket, and can support real typing.
Pity nokia seem to consider it a dead-end product, and go out of their way to ignore it.
pssh on the Palm Treo is the only thing that seems to work for me. Keep in mind I want to use Emacs via my smart phone, so I need Control and Meta (aka Alt) to work well. pssh uses the center key for these, with one click for Control and a second for Meta. It also has a very small font which allows me a 80 column wide view.
I have considered switching to a HTC phone such as the AT&T Tilt with Pocket PuTTY. Unfortunately, it seemed to hard to use for two reasons. One, I couldn't easily find a way to have a really small (but usable) fond. Two, I couldn't find a way to easily enter Control and Meta. I tried this mostly at the store, so if there are solutions to this, please let me know!
I have tried the iPhone with server side ssh script on a friends iPhone. Again the font and keyboard issues made it seem not too feasible. It seems like the font issue would be easy to fix, but the keyboard Control/Meta issue seems even harder to address on the iPhone. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking of getting an iPhone 2.x in July... web surfing has become more important than my ssh access.
Being my two phones of the past 3 years.
The E70 has a -real- keyboard, and runs Putty perfectly.
over the GPRS/3G network, or over WiFi, your choice.
The N95 has a regular phone pad, but I use a folding external bluetooth keyboard if I'm doing a lot of text.
and -every- feature of the N95 rocks. Putty runs perfectly, as always.
I use the E61i with midpssh, which has worked better for me than Putty, though I have long forgotten why.
The E61i's keyboard works great, I can type at a decent clip, and it has a proper control key. Some unix nerd characters (vertical bar, etc.) require 3 or 4 keypresses to get to but it's not that bad. Between wifi, GPRS, and 3G/UMTS I can pretty much always get online.
For example, even in countries where there seems to be no working data service over prepaid GSM SIM cards (e.g., Syria), I've just turned on the wifi sniffer and followed it to a fancy hotel, and then loitered in their lobby to fix a weeping server. The hotel people think I'm just sending text messages.
Downsides: It's a big phone physically, it could use more memory (get the web browser plus a few ssh windows going and you've hit the ceiling), and when the wifi isn't making a connection to a given access point it's very difficult to diagnose why. For example, I've never managed to get it to connect via my MacBook's internet connection sharing, which would be nice so I could sync up the email when I was at an internet cafe and save money on subsequent syncs over the cell network during the day.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The iPhone is fine for typing text.
Yes, for short messages, typing in URLs, etc, it is fine.
What the submitter asked for is not fine general text entry, but the best choice, specifically for ssh. An iPhone (where every slash, period & ampersand is three taps away) is a poor choice for ssh text entry.
Don't be so dismissive until you see what terminal possibilities might arrive with the SDK.
Right, thanks - we're looking for a solution right now, not a possible solution that may come about one day.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
No matter how much you like your shiny iPhone, the poster cited SSH as his primary use case. It means his primary use case is typing shell commands. Which means a phone with a real keyboard will work best for him. Yes, you CAN type text relatively OK with the iPhone. No, that does NOT make it the best phone to type text on. Get a clue!
If the guy had asked for a smooth web browsing experience, recommending a (3G!) iPhone would have been understandable. But for SSH? Pure fanboy, or pure ignorance. Take your pick.
Oh, as for what phone to use - E70 is better if you want the regular phone form factor and have good eyes. But personally I would prefer E61i (with Blackberry form factor), as it has much larger screen (although slightly smaller resolution) which means text is easier to read. And it has more RAM, which means you can run more applications simultaneously. E.g. with E70 running a Java MIDlet and the browser simultaneously is going to be iffy because both are RAM-hungry applications. E61i is newer too, so it has a more recent version of the web browser.
No, not really. I have one of the terminal apps installed on my iPhone and have used it for quickly SSHing in to my home machine. While it works, it becomes incredibly tedious on the virtual keyboard (much more so than normal typing, since autocorrect isn't present and wouldn't pick up on weird bash command names anyways). Yes, I even tried using vi remotely. Again, possible, but not the slightest bit recommended.
I love the benefits of the virtual keyboard for most uses. SSH is most definitely not one of them. The VNC app is much more useful given that touchscreens are much better suited to visual interfaces (and it's surprisingly useful even over EDGE with decent signal strength, enough so that I was able to start a SuperDuper! backup of my system while at a red light on my way to the Leopard launch - no need for the fanboy comments, please - I'm clearly not one of the senseless evangelist types).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Presumably...could also be...Possibly....potentially better...possibility.... don't....what if they did add a model with a physical keyboard?...we do not know everything ...so much in the world may change...
Do you want to use a few more weasel words in your post? Qualify things a little more?
You'd make a great white house spokesperson.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
There are a couple of logical fallacies with your argument.
You are betting on some application coming out in a month, or less then a month. Your argument seems to be that once this application is developed, tested, etc. in less then a month, it will *instantly* be the best ssh application. That's rubbish.
You state that some unknown improvement made to the iphone, at some unkown point in the future might address all the issues theOP might have with the iPhone, and the OP should therefore wait with making *any* decision until such time as the IPhone has this improvement. This logic would extend to saying "and if the next model doesn't have it, wait some more". Thats ridiculous.
And, on the basis of this deeply flawed argument, you call the OP a "hater". That's playground logic. What are you, 12? Does your daddy know you are using his PC?
oh, and if you are still reading, please make sure you realise I am not saying *anything* about any of apple's products (just want to make sure you dont start changing the subject and calling me an apple hater as well).
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Simple check list:
- Does the phone use a standard type of wireless signal that your carrier supports (e.g. GSM900)?
- Can you find instructions on how to set up GPRS on Cingular?
- Do you want to pay the full, unsubsidized fee for the phone?
If you can answer yes to all three of the above, you've got a winner."I guess one could buy a bluetooth keyboard to go with the iPhone"
No, you couldn't. Don't assume iPhone would do anything that a windows mobile device does (for the last five years I might add). No, no, no. When Apple says bluetooth they mean precisely two (out of more than 20) profiles: Hands-Free Profile (HFP) and
Headset Profile (HSP). That means NO keyboard (and "no" many other things like quality audio out - and no remote control for that matter, no serial profile=no bluetooth GPS, no file transfer over bluetooth, no [about 20 times more no]).