Finally got a keyboard case for the Galaxy Tab 10.1

Finally got a keyboard case for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and am glad I did. It was a good decision. The keyboard is nice. For a text-oriented person like myself its really nice to be able to input via typing.

I just spent a while setting up Dropbear SSH client to work from Android Terminal Emulator. Also set up BusyBox which provides many essential shell utilities.

I did not have to install Dropbear to get the Dropbear SSH client binary command – I found it hiding in a directory from SSHDroid.

Since my Tab is rooted (see previous post about how to do this with a Tab running Android ICS) it makes many things easier. The Dropbear binaries were in

/data/data/berserker.android.apps.sshdroidpro/dropbear

I had to remount /system in read-write mode to be able to copy the binaries over:

mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/platform/sdhci-tegra.3/by-num/p4 /system

then just cp -a the binaries over to /system/bin

I also generated a public key for SSH key-based authentication with:

dropbearkey -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

and:

dropbearkey -y -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa | grep “^ssh-rsa ” >> authorized_keys

(see this post for a more full explanation. Don’t remember if had to remount /data read-write similar to above to create the ~/.ssh directory right now mine says its rw.)

One critical thing to know when using the Zagg keyboard – there is no Esc key, but Ctrl-[ (Ctrl + left bracket) works the same.

I also installed External Keyboard Helper Pro since Android has been changing my default input method from Hacker’s Keyboard to the massively bleh Samsung one without my permission.

Now I will only need to switch my broadband service to static IP (which Sonic.net allows for free – thanks to them for being so cool) and setting up a port-forward for SSH through my modem/router and I’ll be able to SSH in to my main home system from anywhere.

There’s something primal about being able to use vim in a remote shell from anywhere.

This is what my custom SSH connection script in /system/bin looks like:

#!/system/bin/sh

ssh -i /data/.ssh/id_rsa user@123.45.67.89


On a normal Linux system you would be able to specify this in .ssh/config however Dropbear’s ssh command is more primitive and requires explicit options to be specifiec, hence the need for scripts similar to above.