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A day without X

terminally-incoherent.com — Would you be able to survive one full day without using the X server? Linux offers us a wide assortment of CLI based tools. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able look up stuff online, read your email, look at pictures, watch movies and listen to music without X. Here is a list of apps that will help you survive a day without the X server.

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  • leszek, on 10/11/2007, -0/+75for your movies, you can see Starwars episode IV in ascii with telnet:
    telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
    • wisam, on 10/11/2007, -0/+24watching movies using framebuffer is as easy as:
      mplayer -vo fbdev movie.avi
    • Yoshi39, on 10/11/2007, -0/+16I have been thinking about diffrent ways to save battery time on my laptop when flying so I was wondering would using framebuffer actually use more battery (as you dont get hardware acceleration) or would it use less?
      Edit: To clairify I mean that I would kill Xorg and then run mplayer from the CLI
    • zoroko, on 10/11/2007, -32/+12I couldn't survive without X..... oh wait, I mean XXX..... I was totally thinking of something else....



      anyone get the redvsblue innunendo?
    • cookiebearo, on 10/11/2007, -10/+2don't you mean "easter egg"? (yes, sarcastic)
      cause that's what this guy made $764 claiming it was and filming it...
      http://www.metacafe.com/watch/295717/windows_xp_hidden_star_wars_movie/

      i emailed metacafe about it but since i'm not the copyright holder i can't have it removed
      then i emailed the guy who made the video about it but he didn't respond and i doubt he did anything

      unfortunately most people are with the "why didn't i do that first?" crowd and not that "that's wrong" crowd
    • salomejones, on 10/11/2007, -2/+11Having been a continual Unix and Unix-clone user since the early days of BSDi, I must say that I was incredibly excited about the very first time I got to use a remote X Terminal (the physical box, not the application), and I have never once looked back. Some things are just faster for me with a command line, like file management and quick commands like "for i in `ls *.tgz`; do tar -zxvf $i; done" (you'll never be faster with a graphical app than that), but almost everything is much, much nicer with a GUI.

      Why order a bucket of earthworms when you can order a nice lobster bisque?
    • MrSpontaneous, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2Duggmirror missed it, but Coral got it:

      http://www.terminally-incoherent.com.nyud.net:8080/blog/2007/05/21/a-day-without-x/
    • nigh7dagger, on 10/11/2007, -6/+4I thought this was gonna be some druggie trying to go a day without his fix. Damn.
    • mlavergn, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8@Yoshi39

      I've tried killing X and watching a movie via fb in hopes of saving battery, honestly, it doesn't do much at all. The screen has to be lit up regardless, so the savings are meager and I really couldn't measure a difference. A good trick which DOES work if you have A LOT of memory, create a ram disk, copy the movie to the ram disk, and put your hard drive to sleep via hdparm. This can get you almost an extra hour of juice assuming you can keep the drive from spinning up (ie. don't let any jobs run in the background).
    • StephenCIreland, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1bravo sir, who the hell had time to do that
    • jimmiejaz, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Use IPv6 and you'll get it in color.
    • jasz, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5To me, all days are days without X.

      I'm a Sysadmin.
    • skyshock21, on 10/11/2007, -7/+2Now are talking PURE CLI, or terminal emulator? Because all those screenshots were of a terminal emulator within X.

      Init 3 = NO x server. Can you still accomplish all that using runlevel 3?
    • bobbknight, on 10/11/2007, -6/+3To be a real product to replace windows, GNU/Linux needs to be stable in its video gui environment.
      We all want new people to come to the fold, we need to make it easier to do so.
      I have had programs die on XP and kill the explorer, just the same as ones on GNU/Linux of various flavors.
      GNU/Linux just needs to be more stable in the graphic environment. I know it can be done, we have the best minds in the world working on GNU/Linux.
      I just hope it comes sooner than later.
    • mapkinase, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1name bun gmail dot com
    • amasiancrasian, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Well, I wonder how ASCII pr0n would look...
    • arnar, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6@mlavergn: serving video from ramdisk is a pretty good idea..

      Anyways - GUIs are useful for one thing and one thing only: to have multiple CLI windows visible :o)
    • mscman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@skyshock21: actually you're wrong.
      runlevel3 gives you no GUI on say suse and RHEL, but Debian and Gentoo both use GUIs for runlevel3.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel
    • Quag7, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0I wouldn't want to live without a GUI or a CLI. I came to Linux specifically because I wanted a more robust CLI. Most people today will probably come to Linux from other GUI operating systems. My recommendation is to learn the CLI, because it is better for some things than others; the same is true of GUIs. I move between both naturally; for me, they are not separate things but part of an integrated "complete" OS.

      I would hate to use an all CLI OS or an all GUI one. Both, to me, are under-featured. If learning the CLI doesn't seem to have many benefits, take a few weeks and really get used to using it (a good way is to lay off of your GUI file manager for awhile). Then, after a few weeks, start deciding for common tasks which is better - sometimes it will be the CLI and sometimes it will be the GUI. Using pipes, redirection, grep, awk, and sed together, in particular, you can do some fantastic filtering of data that would be impossible in a GUI file manager.

      My desktop is a 1920x1440 KDE desktop with 3 panels - top, bottom, and right, with tons of icons, widgets, and crap that lights up like a Christmas tree, with room to display 4 xterms on the screen at once without overlapping. At any given moment, there are at least 3 open.

      Some people *hate* this - consider it busy or bloated or whatever. not me; I like all of my apps one click away, and my desktop is usually covered with apps so I don't want stuff buried on the desktop itself. Also I think *tiling* is key. For years I got into the bad habit of maximizing everything; having multiple things open and displayable at once can really make things easier for some tasks.

      I am a not a software developer either - I just write scripts for fun stuff or system stuff. But last night I organized my nearly decade-old mp3 collection, and did it almost all from the command line. I am not overly concerned about whether I use the GUI or CLI; whatever is fastest, and neither is the fastest, all the time, no matter what people say.

      You can't really beat CLI alternatives to GUI apps for being on the road. You could hop onto a public terminal anywhere (I'm thinking of airports, where I generally do this), run a Java SSH client from a website, ssh in, and use screen to hop right back into your chat session, check your torrents, or easily read your mail.

      While there are obviously things like VNC, the CLI seems to be the optimal thing for working remotely.

      I think people sometimes have a natural distaste for the CLI before they learn to use it, rely on it, and make it part of their habits. At which time it becomes indispensible. I really feel like I'm working with one hand behind my back whenever I have to use, say, Windows XP, which has a command line, but a crappy and underfeatured one, with directory slashes that, from years now of working with Linux, are infuriating due to typing habits (I actually don't mind / have few issues with the Windows GUI).
  • javipas, on 10/11/2007, -0/+33You can watch any movie in ASCII format thanks to MPlayer by issuing the command:

    mplayer -vo aa video_file.xxx

    A screenshot showing the result: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/images/screenshots/aa-03.png

    And it works in real time! Not bad at all :-D
    • pastaq, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9and to get there use www-browser
    • Rhinobird, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2@pastaq

      You mean like links or lynx?
    • michuk, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6@rhinobird: w3m is much better :)
    • xero8472, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4That's awesome! Always nice when I realize my computer can do something cool without even needing to install anything additional.
    • miffe, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4You can also use -vo caca to get color ascii output.
    • directedition, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1A rare moment when squinting at my monitor actually helps me to see. That's Run Lola Run right?
    • kuyman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Elinks has better CSS breakdown support, in my experience, plus it's easy to use coming from the desktop.

      (For those tricky times when NVidia drivers and kernel version are totally screwed up and you need the newest drivers)
  • DaveV, on 10/11/2007, -46/+15Of course, 95% of the desktop market doesn't use X. They use either Windows or OS10. This would mean they could easily survive a day, week, months, probably years without X.
    • pastaq, on 10/11/2007, -4/+22OSX uses X11 if you want it to.
    • sishgupta, on 10/11/2007, -5/+16I use X on windows.

      Regardless, at least that other 5% of the desktop market has the option of running without X. The benefits are endless.
    • pengu, on 10/11/2007, -9/+1@pastag

      i think you mean it CAN use X. and its an extra, not a requirement to do anything. (well unless you consider running that aborted love-child OO.org "doing" something)
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2does anyone know of a way to shutdown OS X's window manager and start only X11? I downloaded Gnome via Fink, but it won't run, even with X running, because it says there is more than one window manager running.
    • MikeFromAmerica, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4You ought to be able to use Gnome instead of quartz-wm by editing /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc. You could probably also get startx to work when logging in as >console that way too. Never tried it though.
    • Hobofuzz, on 10/11/2007, -6/+5@arbulus

      It's not possible. Aqua is tied to the kernel in the same way the Windows GUI is, therefore if Window Manager crashes, so does the system. There is no way to get just X11. It's either Aqua, Aqua w/ X11, or a CLI. You can access the CLI by booting the system into single-user mode, but it's not a good idea to do so unless you need to repair the system.
    • kuyman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@Hobofuzz

      Actually it just takes some work and special compilation, but you can do it. The two aren't really linked together in the same sense that Windows is because the underlying Unix (BSD) just isn't built that way. I'm pretty sure you could could find the right files to edit in Unix to launch XFree86 instead of Aqua.
    • jsebrech, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@Hobofuzz

      This page contains instructions to boot to console on OS X:
      http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Advanced_Mac_OS_X_Tiger

      Starting up in X11 only from there on is simply a matter of installing XDarwin (the Xfree86 port to OS X) and typing startx. OS X's architecture is really no different from linux, except that instead of running X11 it runs Quartz, and instead of using init scripts, it uses launchd.
    • DOGPARTY, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1"OSX uses X11 if you want it to."

      haha
      Why would you want to? AM I RIGHT!
  • punch, on 10/11/2007, -59/+11Annnnnnnnd who cares.
  • Ramble, on 10/11/2007, -27/+10Ok, why would you even want to?
    • GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -8/+25Because we can. By the power of Vi, I have the power!
    • salomejones, on 10/11/2007, -5/+5Why are you digging this one down? It's a perfectly valid question that could lead to some interesting arguments on both sides...unless the general consensus behind going without X in this case is to generate some kind of "street cred".

      About that kind of street cred: if you don't already have it, you never will.
    • ujjwal, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2I may not want to ... but I keep messing around with my arch linux box, and sometimes X stops working. These are nice things to get by with while I figure out whats wrong :)
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7It's nice to know that you can if you had to. What if you mess up your xorg.conf file and didn't back up? you'll have to fix it in the command line.
    • heinousjay, on 10/11/2007, -8/+2There's no "street cred" in the geek world, since nearly all geeks would shrivel under the bright light outside.

      It is cute to watch you guys argue over things like this, though. It reminds me of the nerds in high school never quite grasping that you couldn't argue your way out of a broken nose.
    • salomejones, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7@heinousjay[sic]: Thank you for the timely reminder that while many geeks (male and female alike) are a bit light on muscle and fight when they're young and tend to catch a lot of hell for being geeks---when we grow up we hold the livelihoods of pinheads like you in the palms of our hands.
    • RealityCheque, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1So in other words, Fat Jay was on the receiving end of the broken nose when he was in high school. No wonder why he is so angry and bitter with everyone on here.
    • daftman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1It is simple, like GMorgan said. It is because we can.
      For those who are interested to learn, using X can be extremely powerful when you ssh into your box remotely.
      I use screen, rtorrent to remotely tell my box to download while I am at work. I use vim to fix up my homepage while I am not at my computer. May be now I can watch some movies from home as well just because I can.
    • MrBone, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2For some reason this reminds me of nudists :P

      Why would anyone choose not to wear clothes? Clothes can be so restricting, so unnatural, so bothersome. Taking them of makes them feel free and... Well aerated?

      How does going X-less make people feel?

  • myFriendDerrik, on 10/11/2007, -14/+6First we gonna...ROCK! Then we gonna...ROLL!
    Then we let it...POP! GO! Let it GO!
    X gon give it to ya, he gon give it to ya,
    X gon give it to ya, he gon give it to ya.
    • GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+17Or in this case X not gon give it to ya.
    • ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2I'm listening to X right now. The Great Depression.
  • ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -13/+3Was I the only one thinking this was referring to a day with ecstasy?
    • GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -2/+14What, you mean if someone says X to you your first thought is drugs rather than geeky Unix graphics servers. There is no hope for you. You may as well remove your cup from the cup holder, turn in your CPU and close your end of the tubes now.
    • ricksite, on 10/11/2007, -5/+3I don't actually do X or other drugs but I should probably turn in my geek card because I don't even drink caffine.
    • Woah_G!, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0lol, fail.

      You need to be more geeky.
  • michuk, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4For console music try MOC: http://polishlinux.org/apps/cli/moc-console-audio-player-for-linux/
    For image manipulation, ImageMagick is your friend: http://polishlinux.org/apps/graphics/enchanting-pictures-with-imagemagick/

    Cannot say if these two are included in the article since the webpage doesn't load...
  • merlingen, on 10/11/2007, -28/+5wot is "x server"
    • Philluminati, on 10/11/2007, -3/+9Graphical User Interface Engine for Linux
    • Wartz, on 10/11/2007, -2/+37GET HIM
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5X can run on top of any Unix-like OS (Unix, Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc.) that are by default command line driven operating systems, and gives them the ability to have a graphical interface. It's what tells the system how to draw windows and graphics on the screen. Applications like Gnome or KDE then take that info and make it pretty by using other apps called file managers and desktop environments to give you graphical file browsing access and a pretty desktop.
  • Wartz, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5I've done this for almost a week. It isn't hard once you get used to it.
  • Philluminati, on 10/11/2007, -9/+1who wants to go *really* hard core and use csh instead of bash?
    • gharding, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10Why on earth is that really hardcore?
      /csh user
  • salmog, on 10/11/2007, -3/+30This just confirms what I always thought... Linux users have way to much free time.
    • pengu, on 10/11/2007, -15/+2it comes from being unemployed, greasy UNI students for 10 years at a time (interspersed with 6 month sessions working for less than poverty line wage at an ISP with no business plan just so they can get free internet, to download more source code)
    • rayt5, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18OR they could be people that like computers.
    • VinceNoir, on 10/11/2007, -5/+8Might that be because we're much better at automating our daily tasks? For us, the computer is an extension of our skills. The typical Windows admin still creates user accounts using the GUI. How sad. Only the BEST *nix admins know that the only way to create accounts and set perms in bulk is with scripts. Thankfully Windows got the ability later on down the road, but I'm still betting half of you Windows "admins" don't even know about it and still think you're more efficient with your pointing and drooling.
    • jacekpoplawski, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Because Windows users are constantly busy with fixing their "perfectly stable" system or doing "simple things" with documents in "friendly format".
    • heinousjay, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2The search for supreme efficiency in all things is hardly a common human trait. That's one of the lessons Linux people have yet to learn, and one of the big reasons Linux still struggles for adoption.

      I'll spell it out in the hopes that someone gets it: for normal people, getting the job done quickly is less important than getting it done pleasantly. Considering that Windows doesn't even make things especially pleasant, consider how poor Linux must be in that regard.

      (Also, Windows people don't care about GUI vs. CLI. It's about getting it done, not getting it done in the geekiest way possible. Sorry to burst that little bubble. And I'm not really sorry.)
    • VinceNoir, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@heinousjay

      Oh really? I suppose that explains why only a small part of the population is responsible for the biggest changes in history? I don't think so... I'm no great thinker. I just like things done right and in an orderly fashion. If people can't deal, then they need to disappear...
    • daftman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@salmog
      Yep you are correct.
      Most things that are done on X takes way less time than if it was on a GUI.
      That's why we have ***** of spare time and wrote funny stuff like ASCII Quake
    • zixxer, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1thats because we dont have to spend all day taking care of our windows servers
      :-D
  • Linuturk, on 10/11/2007, -4/+9irssi pwns xchat
  • digduality2, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0Don't forget naim to chat on Aol instant messenger.
  • rauz, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7A day without X would mean no dancing in brightly coloured pants to loud thumping music.

    Oh. RTFA.
  • atrain, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6My laptop used to be exclusively X free... then I installed xubuntu cause I messed up the system somehow...
    Its a P2 - 300Mhz, and it would run circles around my P4 easily...

    Utilities you MUST have:
    mplayer -> music/video
    moc -> mp3 player, with playlists etc...
    w3m / links / lynx -> web browsers
    screen -> Terminal manipulation: split terminals, quick swapping, searching, etc...
    vi/emacs/nano/other -> text editor.

    Once you have those, there is little you can't do! There are lots of cli based msn/aol/icq/jabber/IRC clients out there, so you can get support...
  • slapthemonkey, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2Its not that if it's possible not to use a GUI, the question is if I want not to use GUI. I like the way I am using it now.
  • raamdev, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Here are a couple console applications I use on a daily basis:

    vim - text editing ( http://vim.org )
    mutt - email ( http://mutt.org )
    naim - AIM and IRC messaging ( http://naim.n.ml.org )
    bitlbee - accessed via naim, allows for MSN, Yahoo! and Jabber messaging (which also means GoogleTalk!) through IRC ( http://bitlbee.org )
    screen - "screen"manager to allow applications to persist over different SSH sessions (attach/detach screen sessions) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Screen )
    openssh - tunneling and securing almost anything, from web browsing to Windows Remote Desktop Connection to mapping shared drives ( http://tinyurl.com/2r673 )
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15Nano is so much easier for me than VI or Vim. I don't mean to try to start a flame war or anything, just making an observation.
    • Infowarmachine, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2irssi - for IRC , i use this to connect to bitlbee
      also btdownloadcurses is a text mode bittorrent client, (use it in screen)
    • strictnein, on 10/11/2007, -3/+7@arbulus:
      No flame war needed. Nano is simply the best editor.
    • humbled, on 10/11/2007, -3/+9@arbulus
      I prefer vim, but it's true that nano is easier for people without experience. No flaming necessary...
    • jdhore1, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9I agree that vi/vim might be loads more powerful and possibly easier to use once you learn it, but i don't really want to spend days/weeks learning vi/vim when i can learn nano which does everything i need it to do inside of an hour...
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Thanks everybody. I was just a bit nervous. I've seen some VI vs emacs debates turn pretty nasty.
    • daftman, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2nano is great to edit config files etc.
      When you edit thousand lines of source code, you'll be inefficient if you don't use vim.
  • ishmal, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1The most recent thing I've stumbled across, which I like a LOT, is WinSCP's ability to edit a file on a remote server. It does this by copying a temporary copy to the local client machine, and listens for the save, when it makes the copy back. This is great for editing files on a remote server when you don't have the luxury of using X.
    • rayt5, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I though Winscp was for Windows? Linux is native to ssh.
  • Moparx, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2I could easily go without X if I wanted too as I personally prefer using console applications over GUI.
  • OnymousHero, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5Does anyone know a skype-like VOIP client that runs on linux (without X)? I need something like this for my server...
  • roprot, on 10/11/2007, -3/+0I only wish XMLShell were still around .. that'd rock.
  • carrett, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1as an alternative to moc, there's mp3blaster, which worked just fine for me when i tried this out for about a month or so. also, bittorrent or bittornado both have cli versions (btdownloadcurses or btdownloadheadless, depending on your needs).

    the handy thing about *nix is that most of the frontends are guis for pre-existing, awesome pieces of software.
  • baalzebub, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3with my best John Wayne voice - a day without X is like a day without sunshine...

    seriously though, going without X can be done, but it wont be nearly as feature rich and it wont be nearly as fun...

    cd xc
    make World
  • specialK16, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1Site is down, anyone care to give us a¡freaking link!?
  • OneAndOnlySnob, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1That sure went down fast.

    http://duggmirror.com
  • maciakl, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Digg effect. The server just caught on fire. Good job guys. LOL
    • raamdev, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1I'll bet the site would still be up if the entire contents of the page were viewable from within lynx.
  • DarkJesus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0Ach, I wanted to read this.
  • Urusai, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5Can we get a spinning console with wobble effects? It's gots ta have da wobble!
  • DnasTheGreat, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Ever done a Gentoo install? It usually takes a day or two before X and a decent WM gets installed. I live without X perfectly fine while waiting.

    Some other nice CLI tools:
    - screen - very nice way to manage multiple sessions at once. Will have to look into twin though.
    - finch - Pidgin (aka Gaim) has a text-only GUI. Well, actually both pidgin and finch are frontends to libpurple, so they're more of siblings, but whatever.
    - libcaca - color ascii library. Comes with an image viewer, which is nifty (caca-utils in Debian)
    • shuffle2, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1i usually install gentoo from slax :) then i have nice kde to let me point and drool.
  • seraphimGaurd, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3When my high school CCNA teacher first introduced me to Linux, he taught me to be a console-jockey. That is where most of the power is in Linux. I think all institutions of learning should run Linux instead of Windows to not only save money, but to provide much more functionality. Yes, whatever you can do in Windows you can do in Linux, but there is power in the CLI. Linux also provides curses which is what most of these programs are run from, something very useful in Linux.
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3When I was in high school I learned to program FORTRAN 95 on a Mac running OS 8 and we telnet'd into a Solaris server and then programed in the command line.
  • jawagas, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5The description says it all, you are merely 'Surviving' a day without X.
    You'll come around sooner or later.
    • daftman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1meh, wasn't meant to be a permanent things. For a full desktop experience, people eventually crawl back to X. But for sysadmins, they get their work done faster and go home to their wife and kids.
  • chrisutley, on 10/11/2007, -5/+2A day without X? Why? How about a day without HFS or NTFS? A day without TCP!!! Good luck.
  • humbled, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2The article says that the main reason to use Mutt over Pine is the editor. However, Pine uses your environmental editor command so long as you have a few options checked: enable-alternate-editor-cmd and enable-alternate-editor-implicitly. Then when you export editor = vim (or emacs, or nano, or whatever), Pine will pick that up and use it.
  • ollywompus, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Wow, I think it's interesting all the people that are responding with "why would you want to" or "who cares". Obviously you've never done a linux install on some bleeding edge hardware, only to find that Xorg won't start because the video card needs manual xorg.conf tweaking. Scenario (this happened to me about a year ago):

    Installed Ubuntu on a new laptop, but Xorg barfed everywhere. I tried a bunch of settings in xorg.conf, couldn't make it work. This is my only computer, so if I wanted to get some community help (which I did), how would I do that without that good 'ole GUI to get me to some forums or mailing lists? For you true new users, how do you get on a wireless network without that "great" little wireless config gui thingy (I hate it, but I hear it's great).

    To solve my problems: got on the wireless network (iwconfig), grabbed an IP (dhclient), updated my system (apt-get), installed elinks for console web browsing... found my information, editited the xorg.conf (vim), and was up and running.

    Without knowledge of the CLI and working without X? Most people would simply wipe their drive and start over.

    -olly
    • jdhore1, on 10/11/2007, -2/+1very good points olly...if you don't know how to use CLI apps for stuff and you stay on the GUI, when things break in Linux or even in Windows, you're up ***** creek and have to reformat...i was like this a few years ago...now i find the GUI faster/easier for some things and CLI faster for some things, but at least i know how to use basic CLI tools so i don't have to reformat to get my OS working again.
    • jsebrech, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The first linux install I ever did was on a matrox millenium II card that only supported X in 320x240. It took 5 months before there was an (experimental) driver. Even then I had to calculate my own modelines and create my conf files in vi, because my monitor was some outlandish thing that the standard modelines barfed out on.

      Both ways through the snow I tell you ;)
  • directedition, on 10/11/2007, -3/+3Ever try to install Gentoo? I have several times gone a week without X. Someone needs to invent Xcaca.
  • m0tbaillie, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2Given that the average Linux user on Digg uses Ubuntu, probably not.

    I do, however, use a development server at work with a vmware host that runs a couple of distros that don't even have X installed. So yea, I do quite a bit of work without having to use X.
  • Plugh, on 10/11/2007, -6/+2I regularly go a week or two without X.
    On my Mac.
    • arbulus, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Not me, since I run Gimp and OOo on my Mac.
    • stalefries, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Arbulus: you may like looking into Neooffice (http://neooffice.org ).
      As for the Gimp and Inkscape, I can't wait until they finish that port of GTK to the Mac...
  • FyberOptic, on 10/11/2007, -3/+5Personally I prefer linux without the GUI anyway, but that's mostly because I use Windows on my main machine and SSH into the linux machines I manage. Let's face it, GUIs in linux have never been up to par with Windows, and while they're getting close, they'll never be as speedy and stable as what I have here in XP. XP hasn't crashed on me in a long long time (and even when it did, it was my fault indirectly), where as the last time I was working with X, I had the X server crash and restart, losing all my windows (and work). Isn't the only time it's ever happened, either, and I'm sure others have had bad experiences with such things. I'm just not keen on an OS having an unstable layer that's capable of bringing down everything on top of it with the blink of an eye.

  • DonCarcharo, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2After reading this article I decided to remove X from the Linux box I built my mother. She was a little standoffish about my choice at first but once I explained that her computer would be more secure she seemed to warm up a bit. All in all the transition went pretty smooth. Sure there's a slight loss of productivity now that she has to refer to a binder of printed shell commands in order to check her email but she'll thank me for saving all those CPU cycles.
  • PedleZelnip, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1Of course I can go a day without X. In fact I go every day without X as I run Windows. :p
  • futureisours, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1uhh I survive everyday without using it. dumb headline.
  • stealthc, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8Sometimes... I like to find the guy dugg the lowest... and digg him up.
  • ericeberg, on 10/11/2007, -3/+0Well, let me think. Hmm, yes. It's called "Macintosh."
  • Hindu_Wardrobe, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Also, if you need a cursor in the CLI, install gpm. Will give you a simple cursor to highlight and copy text. Pretty useful.
  • vroom101, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1SysAdmins (and Cisco CCIE-pursuing) NetAdmins to-be, a few words of advice: Date, marry, and then continue to spend quality time with . . . Thy Command Line Interface.
  • chozsun, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Day without X? Try a Decade without X.

    Why would I want that sorry piece of crap?
  • repruhsent, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I can survive just fine without X (I'm typing this from Aqua).
    • kuyman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1can you survive a day without aqua on your own system?

      i can and i'm using a macbook.
  • mikemcl, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Way to use X for all the screen shots.
  • deadbaby, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I have no doubts I could do it but I'm not sure why I'd want to. If you're looking for an efficient setup a WM like blackbox with several xterms is much better, IMO, than dealing with multiple console sessions directly.
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