Nobody has to tell me I’m flaky. I managed to figure that out a long ago. I’m still trying to get life on the console worked out, even if there are things I can’t do without building the OS from scratch. Since I must run a GUI at least part-time, I have to run something light enough to be usable on this ancient laptop. In this case, that’s Etch.
However, I’m still poking around with Etch’s console because the console is where I want to be. So I’ve built Alpine 2.00 from source, using the trick of prepping by issuing: apt-get build-dep alpine (after making sure I had Backports for both packages and sources). I’m also running the latest Elinks with all the optional libs I actually use. GDM doesn’t run, and I only use the GUI when the job requires it.
I’ve learned something interesting: In using Vim as the editor for blogging, I can also set it to present a smaller window so my eyes don’t lose track of the train of thought. Humans don’t easily scan text wider than 80 columns, so I told Vim to limit the left margin visually:
set columns=80
set lines=60
Looks pretty good on my 1400×1050 framebuffer resolution.
I’m hooked. I don’t want to go back to GUI Land.
