OSNews

I lived over a decade without X on Windows.

I could live without X on *nix as I've deal with it regularly but if faced with it permanently, my system would quickly become far less interesting.

Looking at a black screen with white text 24/7 only generates so much excitement. Your also guaranteed a migraine headache to top it off.

For others, one has to imagine how much power a blinking white cursor draws from their $2000+ gaming system and how great of an investment that might have been for the owner.

Edited 2007-05-22 06:48

White text? Wow -- I've been using colorized tools even on the Solaris development servers here. I color code my PuTTY screens depending on the server I'm logged into, I use color ls, Midnight Commander, syntax highlighting in vim, etc.

There's no reason at all to force yourself into a monochrome world, even at the command line. :-)

Edited 2007-05-22 15:31

Yes. There should be more text-mode color around. Make, for example would be far more intelligable with some color.

When I edit a Makefile in Midnight Commander's built-in editor, leading tabs are shown as BIG RED BLOCKS.

Very hard to miss. :-)

Heh. Was talking about the Make output.

True, that would be nice. :-)

On the mainframe side I ended up writing a compiler results parsing program that would spin through the rather lengthy results output of our FORTRAN compiler and highlight key information (white is normal, grey is caution/warning, red is Bad Stuff).

http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner/errchk.gif

I may do the same thing under Solaris here. The gcc compiler spits out a ton of crap. :-)

"There's no reason at all to force yourself into a monochrome world, even at the command line. :-) "

It's even possible to have coloured applications via SSH as long as the terminal emulation can use colours and attributes. A DEC vt100 can't. :-)

I could live without X on *nix as I've deal with it regularly but if faced with it permanently, my system would quickly become far less interesting.

As we say, use the right tool for the job. GUI applications are the best tools for a lot of tasks. Personally, I use mostly GUI apps at home, but I reach for the terminal for almost all system administration and some file management tasks simply because it's easier--for me. At work, I spend most of my time in about a dozen terminals ssh'ed into a remote box. I have a script that checks my open terminals and starts a new one with a unique foreground color in order of my personal color preferences. This way I can quickly find the orange terminal I was using for cscope, for example. It's all about what works for me, which might seem weird or even frightening to other people.

Looking at a black screen with white text 24/7 only generates so much excitement. Your also guaranteed a migraine headache to top it off.

In my experience, looking at predominantly white screens common in GUI environments by default is more likely to cause headaches and eye strain than looking at mostly black screens. I always use black backgrounds wherever practical, because shining all that unnecessary light at my eyes all day is sure the accelerate the deterioration of my vision as I get older.

For others, one has to imagine how much power a blinking white cursor draws from their $2000+ gaming system and how great of an investment that might have been for the owner.

Actually, that blinking cursor sucks more power than you might think, particularly due to the way that modern CPUs manage their power states. A completely idle machine with a blinking cursor has to wake up every half second or so to make the cursor blink, which can even prevent the machine from ever entering the deeper sleep states. This is usually irrelevant on full-blown desktop, since there are all sorts of applications and daemons waking up left and right to poll stuff and pat themselves on the back. When the blinking cursor in the terminal becomes the limiting factor on idle power consumption, we know the PowerTOP project has been successful.

I used just CLI apps for a year on my old pentium I 233Mhz 64MB toshiba laptop in 2005.
I used:
elinks(web browser with tab support)
irssi+bitlbee(irc and IM)
zgv (for graphics viewing)
vim (text editing)
mutt (email)

Pretty much everything is doable, except interactive graphics editing and accessing broken websites.

The problem is that there are many broken websites with broken layouts and stupid uses of javascript or flash. With AJAX becoming more popular less and less sites are usable in elinks.

- Jesse McNelis

> Pretty much everything is doable, except interactive graphics editing
> and accessing broken websites.

Add websites with Flash *content* like Youtube (certainly not broken).

Playing video in flash is certainly broken.
We already have perfectly fine media players to play videos on. eg. mplayer

There is no reason to force a user to use a media player that the site owner decides.

> Playing video in flash is certainly broken.

If playing video in flash doesn't work for you, then it's likely a problem with your distro, not with the website. I can watch Youtube videos on both OSX and Windows, and for what I know Linux should do it too, so it's probably not the website that is broken.

>> Playing video in flash is certainly broken.

>If playing video in flash doesn't work for you, then >it's likely a problem with your distro, not with the >website. I can watch Youtube videos on both OSX and >Windows, and for what I know Linux should do it too, so >it's probably not the website that is broken.

You misunderstand. Playing video in flash is a broken concept not a broken implementation.

> You misunderstand. Playing video in flash is a broken concept not a
> broken implementation.

Why? It works. It works even better than most other kind of video playback I have experienced. What is so broken about it?

It's not standard.
It doesn't work if you don't have a flash plugin.
It uses a generic plugin to load a code (that can be potentially malicious) to ask the plugin to display the video, which is utterly complicated for something that should be as simple as <embed src="..."/>.

"Playing video in flash is certainly broken."

"Broken" is not the word I would have used. I'd say (ab)using "Flash" as a replacement for HTML, images and video streaming is sick.

Most video portals today use "Flash". I would not complain if "Flash" would be an open standard, implemented as a standard feature in every major browser, such as the Javascript interpreter or the HTML and image renderer. But it's not that easy today. I think the company manufacturing "Flash" is to be blamed here, as well as the content providers pushing "Flash" onto users' desktops.

"We already have perfectly fine media players to play videos on. eg. mplayer"

We had them years ago, but nobody uses them. Open standards? Pah! Interoperability? Hah! Worst solution always wins. :-)

"There is no reason to force a user to use a media player that the site owner decides."

But that's the way it is. You want this? You need that. Some web sites even require outdated and strange browsers to work, and why is this? Because some Skriptkiddie is not smart enough to use Javascript properly.

"""
"Broken" is not the word I would have used. I'd say (ab)using "Flash" as a replacement for HTML, images and video streaming is sick.
"""

Broken, abused, or sick, I must say that when I run into a site with embedded Flash video, I know it is going to work on a Flash-capable Linux box.

Even with the various mplayer, vlc, and Real plugins installed, I usually read "Click Here To View a Mother Fighting Off a Shark To Save Her Kids" as "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here". Typically, I get a popup embedded "player" that just sits there dead on the screen asking if I'm high or low bandwidth, and whether I want Windows Media or Real Video.

I hate flash. But I will give it credit for actually working across platforms.

I'm not sure if mplayer is a "perfectly fine media player"... As much as I hate flash, it "just works".

Mplayer and Xine are just not as friendly. Can I fast-forward and rewind to any place in the file? Can I wait until the video is buffered completely? Sometimes... but usually it doesn't work.

And it's not just mpeg, flv, wmv, etc. files - ogg files don't play any better.

"Mplayer and Xine are just not as friendly. Can I fast-forward and rewind to any place in the file?"

Yes, you just press the cursor keys to navigate in a file, or you click on the buttons provided by kmplayer or gmplayer.

If you have a file that does not support navigation, such as malformed and strangely encoded WMV or AVI streams, you use the proper options, such as -ni, -nobps, -idx and -forceidx (last one always works).

"Can I wait until the video is buffered completely?"

I think you can, just make the setting in mplayer.conf fit your needs.

"Sometimes... but usually it doesn't work."

But it should. Always. Personally, I did not encounter any of the problems you began to describe. But maybe it's because I'm using an older version of mplayer on the box I just tested (mplayer-gtk-esound-0.92.1_1 there). I think other circumstances apply there.

"And it's not just mpeg, flv, wmv, etc. files - ogg files don't play any better."

Hmmm... cannot confirm. Allthough I'm using ogg123 and xmms for ogg file playback, mplayer plays it just fine.

The problem is that there are many broken websites with broken layouts and stupid uses of javascript or flash. With AJAX becoming more popular less and less sites are usable in elinks.

It's called progress you know ...

Not all progress is good.

There are always people who will call progress bad.

It's a matter of choosing the best tool for a particular job... and deciding, in an informed way, what the best tool is.

I switch from GUI to command line all the time, depending upon which is most capable, and what I am most comfortable with, in a particular situation.

And it is important to note that personal experience plays a large part in that decision. Someone who always uses GUIs will be most comfortable with one. Armed with their hammer, every problem will always look like a nail. It's easy to dance the "One Note Samba"... just keep doing things the way you have always done them!

Sounds like I'm championing the command line doesn't it? But I'm not, really.

Times change. If lynx, links, elinks, or elinks2 fail to be useful as web "pages" and web "sites" start to be overshadowed by ajaxified web "applications", then so be it. Acknowledge it.

If you cling to a tool that is no longer useful, even though it used to be, then you will become an anachronism, stuck in the past.

You really do have to do three things:

1. Sample what you can of what tools are out there, both old and new.

2. Be ready to change the way you do things *when it makes sense to*.

3. Stick to your guns *when it makes sense to*.

I use GUIs more than I used to. I can't imagine using elinks to browse the web when Epiphany is easily available on the machine that I am using. But wget might sometimes trump Firefox when I just want a file.

And I tend to file people who insist upon using Mutt, and then complain about how people send them incompatible emails, to be a bit weird.

But I am using mutt at a couple of client sites, where I need an easily scriptable way to send mail as an smtp client rather than server, since the IP address of the machines in question would be filtered by many mail servers on the Internet at large. (Because they are dynamic IPs, not because my clients are spammers!)


Edit: Add disclaimer about my clients not being spammers. ;-)

Edited 2007-05-22 20:59

Yeah. I agree with you. My comment was aimed at those who were complaining about ajax sites being evil.

I ended up using mailx rather than mutt, but I guess that either would do .

"""
I ended up using mailx rather than mutt, but I guess that either would do .
"""

I didn't know mailx would do that. I'm sure I looked over the mailx man page, and it looked like it would only send the mail itself, directly.

I'd prefer to use mailx, as it sounds the simpler solution. How did you do it?

Edited 2007-05-22 21:19

"But I am using mutt at a couple of client sites, where I need an easily scriptable way to send mail as an smtp client rather than server, since the IP address of the machines in question would be filtered by many mail servers on the Internet at large. "

WHat exactly does "as a client" mean here? If it means "using the ISP's mail relay" you could just use any mta (sendmail, postfix , whatever), have it always use the ISP relay and just use mail/mailx.

"There are always people who will call progress bad."

Maybe because it's true sometimes?

Car manufacturers are not tired inventing cars that do need more and more gas and emit more and more CO2, just to get you from A to B. There are better alternatives. But some people think they need a bulldozer in city traffic.

Good progress?

The SS had "great" progress in murdering people. They did not shoot them because this way got to expensive. They used "modern methods" like Zyklon-B gas insted and raised their "successes".

Good progress?

Not every progress is good, especially if it leads into the wrong direction. "Wrong" can be universal (measured at ethic and moral considerations) or very individual (measured at personal skills, needs, or preference). You are the one to decide which solution fits your requirements best.

Offering choice is progress.

Taking choice is progress.

"

"

I've edited pictures in a command line hex editor before. Not really practical, but doable none-the-less.

(X)Emacs' XPM mode can edit xpm pictures in place...
Just convert (ImageMagick) them to xpm, edit and convert back again.

«Pretty much everything is doable, except interactive graphics editing and accessing broken websites. »

What about word processing and PDF ?

Use LaTeX.

"What about word processing and PDF ?"

% pdflatex bratwurst.tex
% pdftotext bratwurst.pdf - | less
% lpr bratwurst.pdf

No problems. But remember: While the term word processing refers to things usually done with OpenOffice, LaTeX is for typesetting, which is the more professional "big brother" of word processing. It requires few time to learn, but is very powerful. It can even do presentations (foiltex + xpdf -fullscreen)! :-)

Under DOS, WordPerfect 6.1 and StarWriter 6 were both quite capable, and each had a WYSIWYG editing mode in addition to the text mode UI.

A text-mode PDF viewer which worked for PDF files like Links works for HTML files would be cool. :-)

"The problem is that there are many broken websites with broken layouts and stupid uses of javascript or flash. With AJAX becoming more popular less and less sites are usable in elinks. "

Let me be more precise: With the improper use of "Flash" or AJAX, sites become inaccessible, especially for blind people who rely on having the valid HTML tags and attributes set (img alt, longdesc). Lynx et al. are good to test if your web site is barrier free. If it runs in a text mode browser, blind people can read it via a braille device. Actually, these devices transform characters (not images!) into "mechanical" sensory inputs a blind person can receive. Software that reads page content to the user works in a similar way. Actually, this is not done otherwise today.

Maybe, you could say: If a page is not receptable, it is not worth looking at... attention, provocant claim... :-)

I use Microsoft products for the majority of the time. No use for X there.

I'm sorry.

Indeed. A more appropriate summary would say "while you compile X." This is true in the case of source-based distro users who compile everything. Although I never tried it, one method of installing Gentoo is to boot a live CD that has X Windows and a DE (Gnome/KDE, whatever you fancy) then go about extracting the stage tarball, chroot when you need to etc. You're already in a graphical desktop so you can surf or play games while you wait for packages to compile.

However the article is about CLI software, in which case I'd use one of the function keys to switch to another virtual terminal and use the CLI tools, if they were on the live cd.

Well, watching movies and all such is handy when you're still compiling everything...since I use Gentoo, I usually emerge links and mplayer, and surf the web or watch some movie while X is still being compiled. It's really very handy, IMHO.

"I used to use the Norton Commander too. Much easier than plain old DOS. I still prefer to use the Midnight Commander in Linux instead of just the command line."

The MC is a great innovation. Most operations done are "source target operations", such as copying, moving, or symlinking. Therefore, the standard MC layout is great. I do use it for most tasks. Even its editor, mcedit, is a powerful tool. It even supports syntax highlighting. Proper bindings (mc.ext) will enable power to connect file types to operations, such as playing OGG files (ogg123) or processing tex files (pdflatex).

"And everyone knows that if you use linux, you just have to use the command line at some point. "

This is correct for UNIX, too. If everything else fails, the CLI still works and lets you do most of the work, There are great applications for CLI use, some of them are much faster than their GUI brothers.

Last to mention, CLI allows you to use a system via SSH or console without any configuration. Having X redirected to another system needs some more configuration to run.

While the CLI seems obsoleted to most users today, it is fully programmable. You can connect inputs and outputs, redirect, remote control applications and other stuff, depending on the shell and applications used. Especially the GUI is not fully programmable, so it won't fit some very special needs or requirements.

Pretty much the same thing here. At work, I use a notebook (Thinkpad Z61t) running XP Pro. My job is writing/modifying shell scripts (Korn shell) and Perl scripts in a Unix environment (Solaris 8 & 10). To do this, I use SecureCRT (I also use PuTTY, but I generally have around a half-dozen open sessions or more, so SecureCRT comes in handy!).

I do have a Linux box behind me, that I use to develop the scripts with (our instances of Solaris are quite lacking), but I usually just use PuTTY or SecureCRT in there too. As an added bonus, SecureCRT gives me cut & paste capabilities between the session windows.

using aalib is like watching b/w movies, use cacalib instead :]

ps: there is aaut too http://icculus.org/~chunky/ut/aaut/
pss: aaQ2 anyone? http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

Edited 2007-05-22 06:49

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

star wars in achii

Dude that version of Star Wars rocks! :-)

Nik

Good point, I was thinking the same thing exactly. If I need to browse the web, look at pictures, etc.. I just go to a desktop OS. The only people who would even bother with this are still living at home watching re-runs of Magnum P.I. and listening to Billy Ocean

<p>But knowing there are CLI apps that don't need X to run can revive very old boxes for some new use.</p>

<p>Think of http://geexbox.org/en/index.html">GeeXboX

I'll have you know I enjoy a rousing episode of Magnum (and it appears regularly on at least three channels I subscribe to!), but this DOS dinosaur will roar again.

Erm... I may have to rethink that. Does Billy Joel count?

"""
Erm... I may have to rethink that. Does Billy Joel count?
"""

This is probably not the best time to confess to being a Barbra Streisand fan, so I won't. ;-)

"""
This article is totally counterproductive and basically useless.
"""

When people post this kind of response to articles like this one, I can't help wondering what they are doing on this site in the first place.

The fare on Slashdot may suit you better. But I find the company more colorful and interesting here.

Edited 2007-05-22 14:03

> I'm really productive without bloatware like KDE/Gnome.

KDE/Gnome are not bloatware.
They can run quite smoothly on relatively modest hardware. And they can provide just a nice basic DE if you strip 'em down a bit (window manager, file manager, a few config tools).
They're just not for you, apparently.

There is a huge inflation of the word "bloatware" in software land.

If you strip a DE down to just the WM and FM, then what exactly do you get that you don't have with standalone components, like WindowMaker or OpenBox + ROX or Thunar?

I guess KDE/GNOME are not for me either.

There is a huge inflation of the word "bloatware"

Agreed.

There is a huge inflation of the word "bloatware" in software land.

Understatement of the century

> KDE/Gnome are not bloatware.

emerge -pv gnome
Total: 218 packages (218 new)

emerge -pv kde
Total: 57 packages

And I have almost all my use flags turned off. I'm not saying it can't be stripped down, but on most distros, thats what you're going to get when you install gnome or kde.

ion3 is enough for me. Besides a web browser and rxvt-unicode, I don't need (or use for that matter) any other x apps. And I prefer to surf in full screen in another workspace anyway. I'm not saying this is better than using gnome or kde; different solutions for different needs. If anything I wish I was less dependent on the keyboard. My wrists can't take many more years of this.

Those looking for a good text based browser should checkout w3m. It's the best of the bunch imho.

"Yes, ask an administrator for example. Imo the console in Unix is more powerful than every X application."

As I mentioned before, the command line is fully programmable, a feature that no X application provides. This is its strength. Maybe today's administrators see no need for a CLI access, but in case of trouble, you're happy with it. Maybe I'm a bit old fashioned, but I would not be happy with a system that does not provide the most direct and easiest access to its power.

"I'm really productive without bloatware like KDE/Gnome."

Na na, I don't think KDE or Gnome are bloatware. Use the right tool for every task. Both KDE and Gnome, as well as other desktop environments or window managers have their right to exist, their purpose, their fans, and are able to help doing a lot of things.

Sure. Does it make sense? Not really, unless you are running on ancient hardware (such as a 486).

Then again, there would probably be a use for a text-only OS that could bring old Goodwill machines back to life. There was an article here just the other day about the TRS m100.

(My next-door neighbor still uses his 286, and wonders why nobody is making software for it anymore...)

FreeDOS is not a shabby alternative. Linux or OpenBSD are not either, but as time goes on, they both accumulate more and more features and use more and more disk space. It's still possible to install both on less than a first-generation Pentium, but it may not be trivial.

I have used Slackware 10 on a 486 laptop with 8 MB of RAM comfortably -- but installing it took a couple of days, some null modem cable magic, and a special boot floppy, not to mention a custom kernel image. If you can live with old software, you can certainly use something from the same age as the hardware. In my case, that would be Slackware 3.4.

The problem with old software is that it may be full of security holes. This is not always true, as many security holes are created by adding features, but I think it is a concern, especially if you decide to put into use dozens of old machines as, say, network terminals. Personally, I don't mind old software at all, because it's usually sleeker and even faster than more feature rich one, and it still gets the job done marvellously.

If it were not for my DVD movies and FLAC collection, I could downgrade to a 486 any day. Sure, it might take longer to compile a program, but I'm not in a hurry.

MSN IM CLIENT= centerICQ

I took your advice, and CenterICQ was exactly what the doctor ordered, now I am fully CLI armed

"I also burn DVDs from the CLI when I am in a hurry.

Same here, too. Things like

% vobcopy

or

% copycd

are faster to be done than click'n'wait in a GUI. Especially for diagnostics the text mode is very useful, and if you have setup your mail subsystem well, you can do things like

% pciconf -lv | mail -s "blablubb.local's hardware" bigadmin@bigunixbox.foo

or do even strange things like

% cat ${LOGFILES} | grep "<" | grep ">" | grep -v "CTCP" | cut -d '<' -f 2 | cut -d '>' -f 1 | sort | uniq -d | xargs echo > nicklist.txt

where no GUI application is available for.
"This article gave me a good image viewer, and I decided to try out Midnight Commander too."

You'll obey to the mighty Commander, at least at Midnight. :-)

"Looks like the only thing you can't do without X is take screenshots "

Take a photo with a camera - no X needed. :-)

It's possible to store the pure text content of a screen with the copy & paste feature the middle mouse button and the virtual terminals provide. But this does not copy colors or attributes. Maybe there's a program to read the terminals screen buffer including them...

Actually I don't use X either in BeOS
http://revolf.free.fr/beos/shots/shot_xemacs_zeta_pretty_gonx.png
(just have the shortcut on the desktop)

It's both off-topic and wrong.

Awesome link! Thanks!

I have been meaning to try out Ubuntu server edition anyway, although you could do this with pretty much any other Linux distro. Slackware, perhaps?