Monday, January 31, 2011

At last usable Equinox console

Eclipse Virgo recieved a brand new contribution that improves the usability of the Equinox console. The contribution is especially useful when connecting via telnet.

Thanks to Lazar Kirchev now Virgo has:

  • line editing
  • command history
  • tab completion
  • grep for telnet

Up to now the console port was bound to both localhost and the external IP. Therefore it was possible to just about everyone to connect to the console.

To address this issue the syntax of the osgi.console property has been extended and now you can add as well the host or address in org.eclipse.virgo.kernel.userregion.properties:

osgi.console=localhost:2401

What's more is that the telnet protocol allows negotiation between the client and the server. Taking advantage of this now there is a way for Virgo to understand which are the exact key bindings used on the client. This basically means that Virgo server running on Windows for example, can handle properly MacOS or Unix clients.

The new features can be used not only in Virgo, but also in every product using Equinox 3.7:


Virgo (3.0.0 M1)

  1. Download Virgo from here
  2. Enable the console as described in the User guide
  3. Start Virgo
  4. Connect with telnet to port 2401

Eclipse 3.7
To use the new features with Eclipse you simply need to drop the bundle in plugins and restart Eclipse. 
Equinox 3.7
If you just want to try the new features you can use the install command. 
If you have P2 enabled (or you like the bundle and want to keep it) you can drop the bundle in dropins and restart Equinox to enable P2 to pick up the bundle.

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