I just installed bash and see it has an option to run bash-setup to boot to bash as opposed to busybox.

I did this as root and hit no where it asked to overwrite my ??? .bashrc and everything works, I boot into bash as root.

I tried as regular "user" but it did not take (took to to busy box).

so I went in as root, did su - to user and ran bash-setup.

it asks 2 questions just like it did at root. I hit yes to change to bash and no to overwriting the .config file (? .bashrc).

well it did not change me to bash and all it did was mess up my prompt.

can you smart people help me? ideally I'd like bash for the user account but if I can't have that I just want my old prompt back...

just uninstall bash from app manager....

thanks, but I want bash and I want it for both user and root...I can't have that?

I just edited /etc/passwd and changed /bin/sh to /bin/bash for root and user.

thanks I will uninstall, reinstall and then try the /etc/passwd method.

I uninstalled and my prompt as user came back. reinstalled bash and edited both user and root in /etc/passwd. root is not fine good prompt and bash. user is still busybox and has messed up prompt. ok I guess I will just do root, too bad.

Is it the prompt that's the problem? If I remember correctly the default one is quite 'complex', especially on the N900 screen.

I edited /etc/profile.d/prompt and just added:
at the end of the file, completely over-riding the code above it.

well the prompt does change (for the worse) for regular user but I could not get the user account to boot to bash, just root. I tried both bash-setup and changing the /etc/passwd for user.

I will just live with a good root prompt and bash on root. thanks

what can u do more in the bash shell?

My favorite is Ctrl+r for 'reverse-i-search', where you can type in any part of a previous command, and the shell will look it up for you.

That alone is enough reason to install bash (to me at least). The keyboard on N900 isn't bad, but it's not great for shell bashing. Being able to easily find that difficult-to-type line is nice.

Auto-completion on remote paths is also fun, it works if you are using public keys with ssh.