I have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default – and I wrote about these.

In Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10, the packages are still there but they’ve changed names! So if you want to use screen with Ubuntu Karmic or later, install packages byobu and byobu-extras, and uninstall screen-profiles and screen-profiles-extras (they were broken on my system after upgrade anyway) and you should find everything works as expected. To run screen with the new features, you should run “byobu” instead – although screen commands seem to work to detach and reattach the screens that result, weirdly.

I’m mostly posting about it because I have been very frustrated and there’s no way I could have guessed, or probably ever will remember, what these packages are called. Apparently a byobu is a japanese room screen … you learn something new every day!