1. Installation

This is a fairly simple procedure. First, you'll need to download x48. You can download any version you like, but the latest 0.6.4 isn't available in .deb format if that's an issue for you. Install the x48 package.

You'll also need to download a ROM at the bottom of that page. Unzip this ROM in your home directory, it will extract to .hp48/.

If you run x48 now you'll probably get an error message that says it can't find the helvetica connectionFont. Luckily from the command line you can override this with x48 -connFont fixed. You can also specify fonts manually with any font you can find in the output of the xlsfonts command. As an example, using this works just fine on my system:

x48 -connFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 \
  -smallFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 \
  -mediumFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 \
  -largeFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-16

You should now be greeted with an old friend.

If you want to put this in your menu, you can create a file ~/.local/share/applications/x48.desktop with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=x48
Comment=The world's greatest calculator
Exec=x48 -connFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -smallFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -mediumFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso8859-16 -largeFont -misc-fixed-bold-r-normal--15-140-75-75-c-90-iso8859-16
Icon=accessories-calculator
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Utility;Calculator;