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View Full Version : [ubuntu] Lightweight Desktop Solution for CLI Aficionados



CosmicFlux
May 12th, 2013, 09:22 PM
Hi,

As a lover of all things command line, I was very interested by a blog post from a Debian user named Salem summarizing an idea to use gnome terminal as a complete desktop environment. I decided to try and implement this idea on my own box, and am very happy with the results. A shell script launches instances of gnome-terminal and an instance of xclock. I can set the main terminal window to have tabs containing my various CLI interfaces (email, twitter client etc.) and the other windows allow multitasking, which gives me full control over my computer using the command line. Some may consider this retro, but I love the purity in this. There is something slightly magical about having written communication with your system - and it means I can get things done much quicker AND make the best use of resources.

And since it's all running over X, I still have access to all my GUI applications as well as the other desktops.

Anyway, I'm definitely an advocate of this idea. I've included a link to a screenshot of my TerminalOS session.


Cosmic
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/2871/screenshotfrom201305122.png

dino99
May 13th, 2013, 05:00 PM
wow thats great :P you can even use oldish hardware :guitar:

slickymaster
May 13th, 2013, 05:11 PM
Yes, it's fabulous, and as dino99 stated is great way of re-using old hardware let aside forgotten.

CosmicFlux
May 14th, 2013, 10:06 PM
Yeah, it's pretty efficient. I'm running an old Acer laptop with just 1GB RAM. Here is a screenshot of watching YouTube video from the command line using mplayer.

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/2807/screenshotfrom201305142.png