inkterm on the Clara Color

[skftrz]

inkterm on the Clara Color - a real terminal, bluetooth + on-screen keyboard, themes.


Been chipping away at this for a while and it finally behaves, so here it is.

It's cmcevoy's inkterm (git.sr.ht/~cmcevoy/inkterm, GPLv3), which was written for the Libra 2 and had never run on a Clara Colour. Rendering is FBInk, so the usual thanks to NiLuJe. It's a proper local terminal - a real pty running /bin/sh on the device, not a shell over SSH.




What works:

Bluetooth keyboard, paired through Kobo's own accessibility settings. It turns up as an ordinary evdev node via uhid and inkterm finds it by itself. No OTG cable, no faff.
On-screen keyboard for when you haven't got one with you. Three layers - shift for capitals, SYM for the full punctuation set, because you cannot leave vi without a colon (not everyday you get to say that lol).
Fifteen colour themes, switched from inside the shell (~: theme molokai). The keyboard recolours along with the terminal, but clears the terminal, so be warned.
Launches from NickelMenu.
terminfo, which the device otherwise has none of whatsoever - there's a libncurses.so.6.1 sitting in /lib that literally cannot open a terminal.

For ages it would reboot the device after about seventy seconds. Every time. No panic, no oops - the kernel log showed a perfectly clean shutdown, which threw me for days because I kept reading it as a crash.

Turned out to be sickel, Kobo's watchdog for Nickel: it pings Nickel, and when Nickel stops answering it kills it and reboots. Suspending Nickel trips it. So does merely blocking Nickel's UI thread by hammering the EPDC. The fix is to SIGSTOP sickel and hindenburg alongside nickel, and resume them on the way out. That's why KOReader never hits this - it kills sickel too.

logread found it, not dmesg. The golden line was "sickel: trying to kill nickel". Talk about being blunt.

Two other problemos that cost me time:

Nickel never mounts /dev/pts, so openpty() fails with ENOENT. KOReader mounts it, which hides the problem entirely if you develop from a KOReader SSH session - as I was.
No pstore, no /proc/last_kmsg, and busybox dmesg has no -w. Nothing survives a reboot. Stream it to your PC instead.
Install: KoboRoot.tgz attached - drop it in .kobo/ and reboot. Needs NickelMenu for the menu entries; KOReader only if you want the "Start SSH" option, which borrows its dropbear.

Big caveat: only tested on a Clara Colour. FBInk identifies the panel at runtime and the terminal sizes itself to whatever it finds, so other Kobos ought to work - but "ought to" is doing a hefty bit of work there, and that's exactly the assumption that stopped it working on mine.

Rough edges: no alternate screen, so vi paints over your scrollback. Cursor stays visible while curses apps redraw. Wide CJK leaves stray spaces. Nothing fatal.

inkterm installer — drop KoboRoot.tgz into .kobo/ and reboot. Installs to .adds/inkterm/ and adds the NickelMenu entries automatically