Text-based system

[K.Mandla]

After tinkering with this machine for a few days, and seeing how miserable it was laboring under X but how perky it was without it, I began to wonder how much can be accomplished without a graphical system.

As far as I can see, so long as you're not into photo editing or digital rendering, there are quite a few things that you can still get done without X and a GUI. mpd and/or mpc and/or ncmpc come to mind, for purposes of audio playback. There are links and w3m and the like for Web access -- sans images, of course. But that should be enough to check your email or read the news.

So anyway ... the queestion is more or less distro-independent. If you have ideas for a text-based system and what you'd use on it, I would like to hear them.

[croak77]

irssi, fetchmail, procmail, msmtp, mutt, snownews, rtorrent, cmus, wget, mc, nano, vi, elinks, and hnb. All are in the repo's accept cmus which is here but mpd/ncmpc-svn is great too.

Also if you use framebuffer you can use mplayer, image viewers like fbida and links with images.

[skymt]

^^ What he said, plus slrn. ^^

[croak77]

I forgot a couple I use, cdrecord, abcde, giftcurs, naim, lftp and netris.

[3rdalbum]

You can use a program called MPlay, which gives you an Ncurses interface to Mplayer.

Links2 gives you graphics through the framebuffer:

sudo links2 -g -mode 1024x768x32K

[K.Mandla]

Links2 gives you graphics through the framebuffer. ...

Now that's slick. Any ideas on how to get the mouse to work? I'd hunt it down myself, but I have to get some sleep ...

[andrew.46]

Hi,

I would partly disagree:

^^ What he said, plus slrn. ^^

The best text-based system would _only_ have slrn

Andrew (slrn fan-boy)

[bonzodog]

I would add screen to this setup. Screen you would find to be an invaluable tool.

[fistfullofroses]

I would say go with Slackware. You get a high console resolution, and for small console programs the installer is amazingly easy.

SC - Spreadsheet
Emacs - Word Processor
w3m - Console browser with image support
naim - Instant Messager
the list continues.

[toupeiro]

90-95% of my administration at work is done without a GUI across several blends and breeds of UNIX and Linux. Solaris 8, 9, and 10, IRIX, RHEL3, RHEL4, HP/UX etc etc.. Heck, even some of my very best windows tools were commandline scripts I wrote to make registry changes to over 700 machines at the same time with a little for/do logic. (do not attempt this with a workstation version of a Microsoft OS!)

For UNIX/Linux, the biggest godsend to console administration is a command called screen. I have screen configured with a .screenrc settings file that lets me very easily open several terminals within a terminal, label them, detach them with whatever program I was running in it still running, and reattach to them whenever I want with simplified hotkeys, and a session reattach script that lets me list my named sessions and attach to them in whichever sequence I want. That enables multitasking without a GUI. Then between wget, scp, vim, pico, cpio, iostat, sar, some nice broad environment variables, and some quick aliases to keep the keystrokes down, a powerful shell like tcsh or zsh, and a little bit of scipting knowledge, the only time I ever need a GUI is to troubleshoot a GUI application a user is having a problem with.

If you've never heard of, or used screen before, read its man page in ubuntu or whatever flavor you're running. Once you start playing with it, you'll really dig it. You can even set it up so that other people can connect to your 'screen' session in view only mode or interactive mode (if you are trying to show someone how to do something, for example)