No two users are a like. Each of us has our own ways and reasons for them. By no means do I pretend here to offer a complete review, since I am neither competent nor interested in that sort of use. This is simply my experience in preparing my laptop for console-only use.
This is something I’ve attempted before, but I was unwilling to change my use pattern to match the requirements. This time, I’ve jettisoned activities, conforming my use to the new reality. For example, I had to cut loose my almost unused Yahoo account. Their webmail interface no longer offers a plain text mode. After a few minutes with Elinks, the site kicks me out with a mysterious 999 error code. I can’t even complain to Yahoo, because it requires JScript not implemented in any text-mode browser which I have tried.
During the installation, I made sure to uncheck the “Desktop” option on tasklist. I kept the laptop and base system. One of the first things I did after installation was complete was to set the console resolution in the menu.lst for Grub. Under “defoptions” I added vga=834, which yields the 1440×1050 resolution native to my Inspiron 4100. I also reconfigured the console-setup to use Terminus fonts.
I took the regular lynx-cure and links2 packages as is. However, I wanted the latest Elinks without features I don’t use, such as scripting, but added in the Spidermonkey library. Then I compiled Alpine 2.0 from source because I’m too lazy to keep track of the five account passwords I have to use. That was configured this way:
./configure --with-local-password-cache-method --with-passfile=.alpinepwd
For most editing I use Joe, and I’ve instructed Alpine to make that the default editor.
I haven’t had time to mess with sound, nor the wifi setup, but the latter is covered here in an earlier post. I’m not much on multimedia, but I will be learning to burn CDs on the console. It’s rare I do anything needing a printer, so I won’t miss OpenOffice much. All my docs are either plaint text or simple HTML. I haven’t done a spreadsheet in years, and have never done the other stuff calling for the other OO.org modules.
For the most part, I simply log into two or three TTYs and keep root logged into at least one, where I control the suspend modes. I installed the uswsusp package because s2ram and s2disk have worked better on this machine than pm-utils.
As noted previously, there’s a lot of stuff on the Net I simply don’t deal with any more. Videos never were a big thing with me, and I don’t usually care for the heavy graphics on most sites, particularly those offering news. I’m currently seeking to put together a list of console-friendly sites for the sort of reading and research I do. Google works well with Elinks until you visit their news page. It has tons of CSS and JScript which causes Elinks to display ghost text and other artifacts all over the page.
I can’t begin to think of a way I could use CUPS from the console even if I did want to print. I realize I would have to learn a lot about Enscript, probably, or something like LaTeX, groff, or some other high-learning-curve formatting language just to begin printing from the console. We no longer have anything like a charater-based printer driver set. Aside from a few ancient commercial packages, we have never had a console word processor in Linux.
Feel free to comment on your favorite console related stuff, but don’t expect me to show any enthusiasm for stuff I don’t do on a computer. I’m very interested in a discussion of console-friendly websites.
