Nelson Green wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> You bring up an interesting point. I am running XFCE, and that is because
> the limited amount of research I did into window managers told me it was
> the simplest "complete" solution, and I did not have time to learn how to
> configure a simple system.
It all depends upon your definition of "complete". For some complete
means everything and then some more. GNOME folks thinks it means 3D
hardware acceleration. For people like me it means simply a way to
manage windows.
> As a DBA, the only use I have ever had for a GUI was creating an XP VM
> to load MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser on, way back
> when I was studying for the certs.
I do almost all of my MySQL administration in a text terminal. Other
people like the GUI though and so I usually install phpmyadmin for
them to use in their web browser. I almost never use it myself
though. Just personal preference. I like being able to recall and
edit my previous command lines.
> I do everything else in a CLI, either a real terminal (if that is
> the correct term for TTYs),
Hmm... A real serial terminal like a VT100? (I actually still own a
vt102. But it is noisy and slow. Mostly it is my footrest these
days.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100
> or an XTerm (Terminal in XFCE).
Technically those are terminal emulators. But in casual conversation
we are often sloppy and imprecise when referring to things.
> When I came on board here everyone was using phpmyadmin and
> phppgadmin. I gave up on both of those after about five minutes and
> went back to mysql and psql.
That is my preferred way to deal with them too.
> I have never installed a GUI on a Linux server,
No X window system at all? So you only operate from the raw text
console? Impressive. Not even the 'twin' text window manager?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/
:-) I am saying this part half joking. I rather wish it were packaged
for Debian. Using it and aalib to view videos would be "a hoot".
> That being said, my current position involves supporting a Drupal driven
> front-end to my DB backends, as well as custom PHP/Javascript pages, so I
> have no choice but to run a GUI of some type. I would like to learn to do so
> with a minimal footprint if you would be willing to share some tips. I find
> my primary use of the GUI is email, the web apps I have to support, and
> Guayadeque for my classical music fixes. I know there are text based
> versions of all, and I use Lynx quite extensively and Alpine to a lesser degree
> (everyone is into "multimedia" email these days *sigh*).
I live in emacs and always have one running. I have many text windows
and many virtual rooms to organize my work. I spend a lot of time in
the text editor. I spend a lot of time working in text windows. I
switch between them using the keyboard. I usually have two to three
windows visible at any time. More than that and they would be too
small. Less and I find I need another one. At any time two to three
is perfect and almost always one of them is emacs such as now typing
in this response. And at this time emacs is a text terminal version
running from mutt.
> Other than those, all I really need is dual monitors so I can update
> things in Terminal and refresh the page in the web browser, and a
> locking screen saver, for which xscreensaver works just fine. In
> fact I wouldn't mind just having TTY1 on one monitor and the GUI on
> the other if that is possible.
>
> So, if you don't mind, what do you use, and how much time is involved in
> setting it up?
I used FVWM since somewhere in the early 1990's specifically because
it existed as a fully functional window manager that wasn't changing.
It was stable over decades. Think of the Ubuntu Unity transition, the
KDE 3->4 transition, the GNOME 2->3 transition, all very disruptive
thrashes for their users. Using fvwm I missed all of those because
fvwm has been stable throughout. (I also missed the hpwm -> mwm ->
CDE thrash too by using fvwm but fewer people today would remember
those these days.) FVWM is a good window manager and is actually the
ancestor of the XFCE window manager.
In any case, a stock fvwm with default configuration is quite usable.
I have customized mine somewhat. One of the best features is the
"pager" and I have changed mine to cover the entire bottom of the
screen and to have many virtual rooms available.
But most recently I have converted to using tiling window managers. I
am currently typing this in while running the 'awesome' window manager.
http://awesome.naquadah.org/
It is a small lightweight tiling window manager. It doesn't require a
mouse and all operations can be done through the keyboard. I haven't
configured it from the default configuation. I just start it and use
the default settings. So as to your question about how much time was
involved in setting it up the answer is so far zero. I have been
wondering how to configure the clock from the default and may actually
create a configuration file to customize it but I haven't yet.
I did however spend time reading the man page so as to learn the
command keys to control it. When first starting with it I refereed to
the man page often until I learned the keys to drive it by memory.
Being an emacs user the other tiling keyboard driven window I have
contemplated trying is 'stumpwm'.
http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/
I will probably try it out eventually. I will probably like it better
in the long run. But no hurry. There is plenty of time. In the
meantime I am using either fvwm or awesome at the moment.
For email I use the 'mutt' mail user agent. It is extremely fast. It
is keyboard driven so once again learning the keystrokes to drive it
meant spending some time reading the manual and the online help. I
have customized mutt extensively. Some of the default behavior is too
"dumbed down". It asks for too many confirmations. Basically like
'rm -i' for everything. It is annoying. But highly customizable.
And so I have customized it and I am extremely happy with it.
http://www.mutt.org/
For the web I tend to use Firefox for most things. I use the
'firemacs' plugin for keyboard driving. I also load up 'noscript' and
'flashblock'. That makes 90% of the web that is written with
"progressive enhancement" in mind very fast and convenient. I am
often surprised at how slow most sites load when those are on. Then
for the growing 10% that requires fluff and glitter of massive
Javascript and Flash I use Chromium with the 'vimium' extension. Each
tab in Chromium is a separate process. Therefore I can kill the tab
and free up the memory consumed by those sites.
When I am doing my own web development it is mostly back end code in
Rails. During that development the CSS hasn't yet been applied and
*I* believe in progressive enhancement so I make good use of emacs-w3m
mode to run a text browser in emacs. I can very quickly flip between
site code and the browser view of it during feature development. And
then of course applying CSS beautifies it up for the graphical web
browser environment. But I am not developing fluffy code for Facebook
or Gmail but much more mundane purely functional things.
I also spend a lot of time logged into remote sites using ssh. In
that mode I have been using 'screen' for a very long time. Yet
another way to manage text windows. It is great. I keep hearing good
things about 'tmux' and will probably try it out eventually too. But
I don't really have a problem with screen so there isn't much
motivation to try a similar but different program. Being an emacs
user I have customized the default screen command key from C-a (used
by me in emacs all of the time) to C-z. I have also added a hard
status line to display useful information.
startup_message off
escape ^z^z
hardstatus on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %H %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "
Not sure how useful this description is but you asked...
Bob
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