Just a real quick post about screen if you’ve ever used Ubuntu screen you might find its a bit nicer than the standard screen you find on other Linux distros. There is a brief intro here Ubuntu brings advanced Screen features to the masses, now if you’ve ever wondered how to get the same sort of setup on distros such as Debian and Gentoo here is the very simple process.

  1. Login to your server and change into you home directory.
  2. wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~kirkland/byobu/byobu.tar.gz
  3. tar -xzvf byobu.tar.gz (be warned this will overwrite your current .screenrc)
  4. Thats it fire up screen and you should be up and running.

Its worth noting that you can tweak what different status updates appear at the bottom of the screen session by modifiying ~/.byobu/status its just a case of uncommenting or commenting out the ones you want to use, then restarting the screen session for the changes to take affect. Gentoo in particular seemed to work well and supported almost all the options.