[wellylug] Forking Linux.

[David Antliff]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Donald Gordon wrote:
> I don't.  Which essential tools only come in GUI flavours?  And do you
> know *anyone* who uses a *nix system purely in text mode?

I love replying to these sorts of posts... :)

I (and many other people of course) make use of several headless Linux 
machines and use console apps on them (over ssh and sometimes even inside 
screen). If I have to, I can tunnel X over ssh and use a GUI program, but 
do you know what... I've never found a program that I deemed essential 
that had to be run this way...

Also, the microwave radio embedded systems I help develop run Linux and 
they don't even have user I/O. The console is on the serial port, there 
are no Xlibs and everything is run entirely in the console. I did try to 
get aalib working on it once for a laugh, but ran out of luck.

However for all my "desktop" machines I run lots of console apps in aterm 
on XFree86 or XOrg. I like small fonts otherwise console + screen would 
work fine. I use Pine for email and have used Lynx when necessary. The 
only thing I'd really miss is watching movies with mplayer - but there's 
always aalib...!

-- 
David.