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Cheers, works perfectly! Just change the /etc/passwd, no need to symlink as that might break stuff

Thanks for the tip and package! Bash is one of the most important features I need.

Running as user I can use bash with colors by editing .bashrc, but as root the shell falls back to busybox e.g. ls is busybox's and cannot recognize options like --color=auto and accept alias.

To solve this, I have to (as root):
1. copy these few lines from .bashrc to /etc/profile:
export LS_OPTIONs='--color=auto'
eval "`dircolors'"
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS -l'
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS -la'

2. edit /etc/passwd
Not only "root" and "user", but "bin" also has to use "/bin/bash".

On top of that, it makes life easier to me to login as root in /home/user rather than /root. so in "root" /home/user (the second last item in "root") becomes the default dir.

Thanks for the guidelines, though I had to do things a little differently myself.

Firstly, for dircolors to work, coreutils-gnu has to be installed - from titan, who else http://maemo.org/packages/view/coreutils-gnu/

Once this is installed, then there are two options; either add /usr/bin/gnu to the PATH in /etc/profile (but ensure it is the first entry), or alias ls to use gls, so that the lines mentioned (which had a couple of typos) read:

I prefer the former method, as then you get the proper gnu versions of tar, dir, uname and many others, rather than the crippled busybox ones. Using this I also found that changing bin's shell to /bin/bash was unnecessary but YMMV.

Finally, I needed to add /sbin and /usr/sbin to the PATH in /etc/profile too as they are not there by default, but are in rootsh - talking of which, /usr/sbin/gainroot has to be changed for "sudo gainroot" to work, so that it uses /bin/bash and also .bash_history rather than .ash_history. It's a one-line change and really straightforward but I can post it if anyone is stuck.

Please...

Thanks in advance.

Okay as root, use an editor of your choice (personally mine is nano) and change

to

That's it

Sorry, forgot to add that the PATH needs changing in the gainroot script too, so that /usr/bin/gnu is in it as in /etc/profile. It would also need to be the first entry if you want the gnu executables to replace the busybox defaults.

I am trying your method and have done these, but the shell (echo $SHELL)is still using busybox (/bin/sh), although gls /w colors is working.

1. Installed coreutils-gnu
2. In /etc/profile: export PATH="/usr/bin/gnu:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin..."
3. In /usr/sbin/gainroot: /usr/bin/gnu is the first in PATH; and HISTFILE=/root/.bash_history /bin/bash

Resource /etc/profile or reboot didn't change anything.

I'm guessing you still have the entries in /etc/passwd so that user and root are using /bin/bash as shell (they're still required, of course)? If so then I'm stumped as to why it would default to /bin/sh..