Re: Console only box?
'ellow,
That's an interesting idea; I have thought about going console-only as
pretty much the only X apps I use are Evolution, Gaim, the GNOME Panel,
metacity and loadsa gnome-terminals.
I have heard that mutt is a great mailer and there are framebuffer (or
ASCII art!) programs to view graphic attachments with. You can also
watch DVDs and play Quake in ASCII modes (or the framebuffer).
(Actually, there are a lot of amazing games known as ``Interactive
Fiction'' -- text adventures -- that will run in the console perfectly.
Some do have incidental sound and/or graphics.)
There is a large number of people who use only text mode; blind
Linux/BSD users often only need Emaspeak (http://emacspeak.sf.net) to do
everything with their computers (as is the extensible nature of Emacs;
it can do much more than just text editing). Personally I prefer the
elegance of vim. If you replaced init with Emacs you might not even
notice the difference -- surely it's almost an OS by now, only really
missing a kernel? :-)
Anyway, back to your point. I think that it would be very easy to get
used to a system that only had text output. Depending on the size of
your consoles you could even watch films in colour ASCII art.
Although not Debian related, you might be interested in
http://oralux.org/ -- its an audio-only Linux distro (i.e. for the
vision impaired) and should give you an idea of the types of programs
you could use to replace your X stuff.
Even ALSA has an ncurses mixer and there is a command-line mpd (music
player daemon [very cool]) client. For web-browsing, there's Elinks,
too.
Finally, you might want to visit http://www.textfiles.com/ and check out
the top 100. All sorts of interesting stuff can be found on that site
(and all of it is in plain text files).
Hope this helps / is of interest!
bye just now,
--
Matthew T. Atkinson <matthew@agrip.org.uk>
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