Installing and using omnitty terminal multiplexer
With more power comes more responsibility, this is obviously true for omnitty. Allowing to run commands on multiple servers simultaneously is really powerful and also dangerous. Imagine a time when you had to run the same commands on a number of servers and you were desperate to do it as soon as possible without leaving any of the servers or not to omit to run one of the commands on a server. Omnitty will undoubtedly cheer you up in such situations and I am going to tell how simple it is to configure, install and use it.
First download omnitty from http://omnitty.sourceforge.net/.
Omnitty depends on libROTE, so go ahead and download that too from http://rote.sf.net/.
We would need ncurses and build tools, therefore, we will install them now
aptitude install build-essential libncurses-dev
We will now compile and install the application.
First extract libROTE
tar xzf rote-0.2.8.tar.gz
Next configure and install it
cd rote-0.2.8/
./configure
make
install (You must be root for it)
The same sequence of commands go for omnitty.
First untar the compressed archive
tar xzf omnitty-0.3.0.tar.gz
./configure
make
install (You must be root for it)
Since libRote is a library we need to load it, so as root run the following command
ldconfig
We are almost done with cooking, now it is time to enjoy the delicious …
Simply just type in omnitty and window will pop out of nowhere. I wonder if you have noticed the cheatsheet yet at the bottom. You may want to maximize the terminal window to fully see everything. To connect to server is as easy as pressing F5 and then username@host. You can connect this way to as many servers as you want.
F2/F3 lets you move to the connected servers. To execute a command on multiple servers, first we turn mcast on with F7. Next we need to tag them by selecting them with F2/F3 and then pressing F4. Now running any command will be executed on all the tagged servers.
Coming up are really magical stuff that will make a noticeable difference in the way you work as Linux admin.
[paypal-donation]
August 21st, 2010 at 2:05 pm
This is really well done. I had already found omnitty, but your recent post indicated it was still running well on modern versions of Debian. I am using lenny.
The only instructions you gave that would be confusing to someone unfamiliar with C and make are these:
make
install.
What you really mean is:
make AND
make install
(I didn’t try make install without make first, but that might work too).
For the right project, omnitty is a wonderful tool. I used the multicast features. (One note here, if you use multicast with vim, results may vary, multicast is not infinitely clever and not sure it captures arrow keys correctly). One obvious point is that gnome-terminal binds the F1 key, which omnitty needs. Not having figured out how to fix this (even reassigning in Keyboard prefs doesn’t), I had to use omnitty in my console (Ctrl-Alt-F1 for noobs). But it’s great!
August 21st, 2010 at 2:52 pm
I have already updated omnitty to make it gnome-terminal compatible.
Only the F1 key is troublesome. Since you have to compile the code anyway,
you can change two lines first.
line 41
from:
” 07F107:menu 06F2/307:sel 03F407:tag” \
to:
” 07F807:menu 06F2/307:sel 03F407:tag” \
line 350
from:
case KEY_F(1): menu_show(); redraw(true); break;
to:
case KEY_F(8): menu_show(); redraw(true); break;
Voila! Useful in gnome-terminal!!