Jailkit: Fix “Error opening terminal: unknown.” by using nano

Generally, if you install Jailkit you can init “editors” to have several editors available in your jail as you also do in your operating system. By using nano or pico it could be possible to running into an error by trying to use them.

The error message could be something like this:

Error opening terminal: unknown.

The problem here is a missing environment so that the editor doesn’t know which environment to use.

Fixing this bug is really easy. You just need to edit the file /etc/jailkit/jk_chrootsh.ini and add a default environment. So just add the following lines:

[DEFAULT]
env = TERM, PATHCode language: PHP (php)

However, if you retry using nano or pico the error message is still the same. What you need to do is reinit the editors. Assuming the jail is located in /var/jail, the command would be:

jk_init -vf /var/jail editors

Make sure to use the -f in order to overwrite existing symbolic links and force a reinit.

After that you can use nano or pico errorless inside the jail.

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