Radix Fidem Blog

This is not about what you should do if you run the console, but what I have experience with Squeeze on my Inspiron 4100 laptop.

I tested the Radeon Framebuffer (“radeonfb”). While it does work, it’s not quite right. There are some odd changes in the default behavior of anything which actually calls on the fbdev to display. It also slowed down a few things. So I’m staying with the default VESA/VGA driver. I also found out Splashy does some odd things, so I had to uninstall. For example, if you set “splash” in your boot options, it will grab the console and wait for X — which never comes, so the splash just sits there blocking all console use. I suppose there are ways to fix that, but I don’t care to dig into obscure configuration parameters, or having to rebuild it from source. It’s not worth it to me.

There are some default keystroke combinations missing from the keyboard config for the console. I can’t combine, say CTRL+RIGHT. I know enough to find out where that’s turned off, but the instructions are a bit too techy, so I’m having to proceed slowly before I’ll understand how to change that. I’m sure there are good reasons for crippling keystrokes which are standard with X, but I’m struggling to fix it to suit me. Once I succeed, I will probably write a very simplified HOWTO for others.

For example, I never realized most framebuffer apps would be broken for the user account until I fixed the permissions. You see, Links2 with the graphical display, along with fbi and fbgs require full console permissions, and those are denied by default. So I had to find out where the permissions files were located and modify them. In this case, it’s: /lib/udev/rules.d/91-permissions.rules. That file had to be modified at line 59:

KERNEL=="tty[0-9]*",       GROUP="root"

to

KERNEL=="tty[0-9]*",    MODE="0666"   GROUP="root"

After reboot, my user account had normal access to the framebuffer.

The most important thing is simply getting used to all the favorite websites viewed another way. Mostly I use Elinks because of the JScript and mouse handling. On the other hand, I have to remember that and MC both require holding down the SHIFT key to copy and paste. Getting past that is simple, but the one thing which still surprises me is how much time I save not having to deal with a graphical display. While some actions do take a few extra steps, I end up getting through with most of my standard Net doings much quicker this way.

I’m still exploring what I’ve gotten myself into, but so far, there’s no turning back.

Perhaps you can come up with your own reasons for it, but running Linux on the console only is certainly worth the effort. For example, a lot of really fine hardware still runs fine, but painfully slow if you run any recent version of the X-server. In my case, it’s simply a matter of comfort and sanity. No one has to tell me I’m way out on the fringe of things, but I really don’t care for the way X and window managers work. I could say that about most GUIs I’ve tried on other operating systems, but that’s surely due in part to my use solely of DOS during my first five years of computer experience. While I hated the limitations of the 80×25 screen, everything else about it was quite comfortable for me from the user perspective. If the number of discussions on Usenet and various forums are any indication, I’m not alone in wishing more was offered for the Linux console.

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on this, and tested the possibilities from time to time. That includes forays into BSD Land, but the framebuffer is very unpopular there. Regardless of what’s possible, what I need for my own use isn’t available without the framebuffer. A key element of promoting Open Source is freedom of choice. It has nothing to do with any inherent superiority from where I sit, but how closely it matches what I need. While specific needs do change, there has been an underlying collection of things I have wished for over the years. Recently, things have come together, and gotten my attention, and I’ve made the move.

For my purposes, this means running Debian Testing (“Squeeze”) on my Dell Inspiron 4100. Relevant specs are:

• 1Ghz P3
• Radeon M6 w/32MB VRAM
• half-GB RAM
• 20GB hard drive, DVD/CDR

You can find the official Debian installation guide here. Having tested a few of the daily build ISOs for Squeeze, I found I couldn’t get one that worked consistently, so I opted for installing Lenny and running an upgrade. In essence, it meant catching TaskSel, un-checking the “Desktop” option, and keeping the Base System and Laptop. Once the system was up and running, I used Nano to change all the references in my /etc/apt/sources.list from “lenny” to “squeeze”. I also had to take out references to the Volatile Repository. Then I ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade. Once that was working, I added the “contrib” and “non-free” plus the Debian-Multimedia repository and ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.

By no means do I claim to be a geek. I’m not even a geek journalist, just a writer with a geeky bent. I’m much better with people than with computers, so my primary computer-related work has been helping ordinary people get along with their computers. For me, computers exist to serve people’s needs, and are otherwise not very important. I frequently advise people, if they can live without a computer, not to get one. Most of my computer use time is in research and writing. Most of what I write is about religion and social sciences, and only a little about computers and other technology. So I tend to learn only so much as I know I’ll use, and secondarily about things I find it useful to teach others. You need not be a genuine computer geek to make use of what follows.

One of the first things is getting the console set up. For my laptop, the native resolution is 1400×1050. To get all of that, I had to edit my /boot/grub/menu.lst at the line which begins with # defoptions and add vga=834. Then, I added the console-setup package, which pulled in the marvelous Terminus console font. Once installed, you’ll need to run this command:

dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

Accept the defaults, keep the UTF-8 encoding, but choose Terminus as the font, using size 16. Reboot and everything should be nice, with sharply defined text filling the screen out to the edges. I also personalize my login prompts. For my user account, I like cyan and yellow, with some indicator of where I am in the file system. You can learn more about that here. Here is what I have posted at the bottom of my ~/.bashrc:

export PS1="\[33[0;36m\]\u@\h\[33[0m\]\w\[33[1;33m\]>\[33[0m\] "

Next, be sure you install GPM (apt-get install gpm) if you intend to use the mouse at all on the console. Apt will set it up for you automatically. If you are using only a two-button mouse/touchpad, you’ll need to run dpkg-reconfigure gpm, accepting all the defaults on each page, but on the last option type in “-2” so you can use your right-click to paste.

A primary activity is web browsing. I typically use these three for different purposes: Elinks, Links2 and Lynx-Current. Installing Lynx and Links2 as-is works fine for my needs: apt-get install lynx-cur links2 (accept the proposed dependencies by hitting “y”). However, I don’t care for the Debian defaults in Elinks, and the latest unstable release is actually significantly better. So after fetching the source for the unstable pre-release, I waded through the various standard dependencies (listed here) to see what I really needed. For example, I have no use for Lua, FSP, IDN, and a few others. However, I understand all too well about Spidermonkey, because way too many sites I use require a certain minimum of JScript, and Elinks is the only browser I’ve tried which implements the minimum. Even then, I’m locked out of a few places I don’t really have to use, such as Yahoo Mail. Aside from the “build-essential” package, I prefer OpenSSL over TLS (libssl-dev), and really wanted the mouse to work (libgpm-dev), and added in zlib1g-dev, libbz2-dev, libexpat1-dev, libkrb5-dev, along with whatever dependencies these brought. I configured it with this line:

./configure --enable-cgi --enable-gopher --enable-exmode --enable-html-highlight

When running Elinks, I typically prefer to select the black background as default (Setup > Options manager > Document > Default color settings > Background color = black, and Default color settings > Use document-specified colors = 1). The trick came in blogging. This applies to Blogger, WordPress and MyOpera. In Elinks, each of them is generally usable with varying levels of difficulty, but once you get past orienting yourself to the odd display, you find yourself using a pretty small block for text entry. Because the latest Elinks allows opening an external editor in all the tabs, I had to hunt down an editor which allowed soft-wrapping on the console. To my knowledge, only Vim does this right. The default method of passing off to an external editor is entering the text box, hitting enter to activate it, then hitting F4. I configured Elinks to use Vim by default (Options manager > Document > Browsing > Forms > External editor = vim).

Since I don’t write code, I really have no other use for Vim. I’m task oriented, learning only what I know I’ll use. I use it only for typing soft-wrapped text in the places where Elinks offers a text input. That I can have spell check on-the-fly is a bouns. So my .vimrc has two lines, so far:

set spell
set wrap linebreak textwidth=0

This, of course, requires you boost the default installed vim-tiny by apt-get install vim-nox. Otherwise, the spell check won’t work, and the soft-wrap will break in the middle of words. The other trick is being patient with the odd cursor movements which come with soft-wrap, since each “paragraph” is treated as a single line, but with a visual-only wrapping. Of course, you can always use this Vim setup to write your longer posts beforehand, then when you get to that part of your blogging and hit F4, you can tell Vim to pull in that prepared file by, first typing :r /path/to/file and then hit ENTER. After that, you can have the file inserted in the text box by saving and closing Vim (:wq).

Another primary activity is email. I have five accounts I can use with any regular mail client. Mutt is almost as bad as Vim for complexity and learning curve. My old favorite Pine has now become Alpine, and it’s capable of running multiple account, all with POP and SMTP actions. However, it requires a little extra work in the setup procedure. It would be hard for me to write up any better than this excellent guide (gone; see this instead). However, Debian’s build of Alpine blocks the saving of passwords. Carp all you want about security, but after reading the explanation, I’m satisfied it’s secure enough to suit my needs. So I rebuilt it from source.

This time, instead of plowing through the list of dependencies, I simply ran apt-get build-dep alpine. When I tried that with Elinks, I got a ton of dependencies calling for major chunks of the X server system. For Alpine, that didn’t happen. So once I got the build dependencies, I pulled down the source package and built it manually. My configure statement looked like this:

./configure --with-local-password-cache-method --with-passfile=.alpinepwd

To get Alpine to save my passwords, I had to create the file first: touch ~/.alpinepwd. The only other item I recommend is Alpine users check out the color highlighting options (Setup > Kolor). On the console, you should stick with the “use-termdef” selection at the top of the form, since I know of no way to get the console to recognize 16 colors.

For most of my standard text editor activity, I use Joe. This permits me to create text files with all the formatting features I need for plain text. For HTML files, the syntax highlighting is very useful. I can report installing Mplayer without X (apt-get install mplayer-nogui) and the codecs package will allow watching videos on the console. I tested a MS-WAV file with “-vo fbdev” and it worked just fine. Sound will work if you fix a bug in the setup script. Sound and video aren’t really significant in my use, but I wanted to work it out for this article.

Finally, there are a couple of things I still wish to see in the future: a console word processor and a full-featured console browser. While the folks at Elinks are doing marvelous work, I have to wonder if there isn’t some way Firefox, WebKit, or one of their lighter versions can’t be ported to a console toolkit. I could care less if there is any hint of graphical rendering, as with Links2, or even pseudo-graphics (say libcaca), but the full range of JScript and so forth would really make a difference. Making it equally mouse-able on the console would be a major plus.

The word processor idea presents the paradox of having hundreds of supporters but no developers. I can’t count how often I’ve read or heard someone wishing for it, but nary a word from anyone among Open Source developers. I realize it’s quite a grand undertaking. However, even something like a clone of Lyx or TeXmacs would be a huge achievement. I’m guessing a major hold up is how to implement printing. For myself, even your basic character-based output would be enough for most purposes. I have no idea what’s involved in linking something like CUPS with a console-TUI word processor. However, anything at all would be much celebrated, even if only by a relatively small group. But if anyone wants a coordinator, PR and documentation writer, I’ll volunteer for those parts. I know for certain I can get the hosting for free. Why there seems to be not a single developer interested is something I can’t answer.

Welcome to the console. Unless things change dramatically, I’m here to stay.

I’m trying to type this from my now console-only Lenny install. I’ve already discovered there are some places on the Net, and some functions on some websites, are inaccessible completely. Anything requiring lots of Javascript to function is simply not an option any more. I certainly can’t keep using anything from Yahoo, for example. They have become increasingly hostile to geeks, and I suppose they block the blind users of plaintext software, as well.

It won’t matter to me. I’m losing interest in the Web as most people experience it. There is simply too much other stuff in my life which matters a lot more. Insofar as the original geeknet still exists, I’ll rediscover so much of it as meets my needs. Otherwise, it can roll on without me.

So we have this story about plans by the US government and some allies to attack some certain sources of cyberspace troubles. If I understand correctly, the idea is to use various methods to implant what amounts to spyware on sources of trouble, and decide from the data gathered what is the best way to respond to such attacks. The article seems to suggest the governments would sponsor doing things to cause the computers used for these attacks to be blocked, to shut down, even to cracking the computer and destroying the operating system.

The first thing which comes to my mind is wondering at the technical competence of the folks in these government agencies. Some of them are really sharp, but they aren’t usually in charge of the decisions. It seems the people who really understand how this all works have very little input on policy. This stuff gets really complicated really fast, and we have people in Congress who think of the Internet as “tubes” — they lack not only the vocabulary, but don’t even comprehend what they see on their home computer screens, much less how it got displayed there. I can’t count how often I’ve had service clients complain about things not working properly, and having no place in their brains for the possibility it’s something on the other end. Telling them, for example, Microsoft refuses to fix the security certificates problem with Outlook 2007 does not help them get used to the pop-up message “warning” them about their ISP’s mail servers. There is a whole raft of things going on in the background with Internet communications we seldom see. If our own Congress is run by people who don’t understand these things, I’m not sure I want anyone in government fiddling with it.

The more obvious threat is a political agenda, hidden or not, which would find these efforts eventually turned against users who don’t really harm anything. Let’s face it, the folks who get their hands on the reins of power are seldom folks like you and I. They don’t value what we value, or they would not be there. Decent people don’t seek to gain power over others. A willingness to take jump on the campaign trail, with all it encompasses — or the willingness to submit to the process for gaining employment in the federal bureaucracy — requires a personality morally unfit to exercise the powers of the office they seek. Such people get to decide what you should be allowed to read, or write and post, on the Net. I feel certain it’s not too many steps from there to deciding what you get to install and run on your computer. Not just the selection of software, but the operating system itself. It might seem like a long leap between blocking evil crackers in foreign countries and oppressing you and I, but I note the PATRIOT Act has not been used once on a single terrorist, but has been used repeatedly against fairly ordinary people doing things which made politicians and bureaucrats unhappy, but was otherwise not even illegal.

To bring it back down to a more personal level, in the long run I expect to lose much of my current use of the Internet. There are already a raft of reasons for that without the government applying meat-space thinking to cyberspace. There are no borders on those wires, and trying to apply them will only break things. I’m sure there are better ways to block troublemakers using DNS. For example, the government already has the authority to order the “backbone” providers of the Internet to firewall certain troublesome folks via IP addresses. I’m sure I don’t understand how that works, but people who do have described it as easily implemented and preferable to other suggestions coming out of Washington, DC. But I am cynical and skeptical about the future of the Net from where I sit.

It’s just a tool for me. For now I post here when I can get my wheezing old laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 to cooperate with the software which runs WordPress. I’m still just a few more incidents from chucking it all and restricting my use to the Linux console. When that happens, I won’t be able to post here any more. This blogware doesn’t work with any text browser I’ve tried. My other blog seems to work well enough with both Elinks and Lynx, and is more important to what I do. However, even that is just a way to publicize my ministry notes to a small group. Even as I type this, things are afoot which will engage my time more fully on the ground here, in meat-space. That said, if I should simply disappear from here and you really want to keep communications with me, try the more archaic methods suggested by this link.