Actually, I really like Plasma Active/Mer on my Archos G9 tablet. Though, I wasn’t too happy with the combination of the standard terminal app and the on-screen keyboard when using Plasma Active/Mer on my Archos G9. Issues that bugged me were primarily missing keys like ESC, CTRL, or the arrow keys. Without these a terminal and especially vi(m) is not really usable. However, for Harmattan and Nemo there is already a great terminal replacement called Finger Term.

While Finger Term is not officially available for Plasma Active it can be easily installed. In order to install Finger Term first the relevant repositories need to be added, then Finger Term needs to be installed, and, finally, at the time of writing, a missing dependency needs to be installed.

The following listing shows the commands to do this. Note that these need to be run as root.

zypper ar http://repo.pub.meego.com/CE:/Apps:/MTF/CE_MW_MTF_armv7l/CE:Apps:MTF.repo
zypper ar http://repo.pub.meego.com/CE:/MW:/MTF/CE_MW_Shared_armv7l/CE:MW:MTF.repo

zypper in fingerterm
zypper in meegotouch-applauncherd

That’s it; now you can use Finger Term on your Plasma Active powered Tablet PC as well. In my opinion, this way it is much easier to hack on the device itself. 🙂