Command Line Daily Driver ChallengeAfter reading an article on Cheapskates Guide about spending a week on an old computer with no GUI interface I decided to try this myself. So I pulled out my heavy ass old HP Pavillion ze4600 and I decided to give it a go. 
Note: Not my image Specifications
Setting upI used AntiX cause it was light on resources and what I already had on hand as I like to use this distro when I work on older computers. I went and disabled the GUI from starting on boot and changed GRUB like this: cd /etc/defaultsudo cp grub grub_originalThen edit /etc/default/grub like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="3"After all that I intalled Lynx, w3m, and Amfora for internet access as I will definitely need to search for information. I used Lynx for HTML pages and Amfora was for Gemini pages. I don't think I ever ended up using w3m. It took a little bit to get used to these programs but once I had some familiarity to them it became way easy to just type a command and load DuckDuckGo and search something. Since Lynx cannot load CSS or JS every page loaded really, really fast. However some of the more bloated pages like Github loaded into a mess and it took a little bit to scroll through and actually find the content I was looking for. Playing VideoGetting video to play on this laptop was an absolute nightmare. The tool I used to do this is youtube-dl, which as the name suggests would download YouTube videos through the command line and played them with mplayer. Searching was done through youtube-dl and I would borrow the video ID's from the search results and find the format codes for video/audio so I can download the video. It might seem like a hassle but the tediousness of it outweighed trying to get mplayer to work. Most of the problems was just that the CPU wasn't really powerful enough to casually watch anything. Mplayer always had a pop up saying that the CPU might be too slow. There was workarounds though such as framedropping but depending on the video it may or may not of helped but that is even if you get the video to appear or do anything. I will take the time to mention however that recovering from errors in the CLI terminal enviroment is a great deal easier than recovering from a crash in GUI. I could either just ctrl+C out of it or press the power button and everything closes out instantly. If I didn't have that I might of actually gave up on this. I had to do this alot trying to get mplayer to work. But when it did, it was fine. But it had a very good chance of fucking up again making me do all this shit again. I made sure to use old YouTube videos for this to try not to overload the laptop. Long story short though, make sure your CPU is a tad bit better if you plan to watch videos. Viewing PicturesFor viewing images in terminal I used a program called FBI (FrameBuffer Imageviewer). It worked perfectly fine and was streamlined very well with the Lynx browser. I just click and image link and it loaded FBI by default and when I quit it went right back to Lynx. I can say there isn't much complaints here and I had no issues setting it up or using it besides learning the commands. There isn't much to say about this one, it just takes a bit of learning to get used to. MultitaskingAfter getting annoyed with doing shit one at a time I eventually went to look for multitasking solutions. I stumbled onto Tmux, a "terminal multiplexer" but it's basically just a window manager for command lines. It took a couple hours to get the basic commands down but I can't say I really understand the entire program. But when it did work it was such a relief to be able to reference something and type without switching back and forth. If you try this yourself I believe Tmux is a necessity to actually use it efficiently in any manner. There is a mouse enabled cursor that you can use with Tmux but it doesn't work like you expect it as I sat for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to copy text. I ended up just typing shit like a copywriter, but there must be a way to do it. Overall it is a good program just requires some learning which isn't a bad thing. The overall lesson here is read the programs documentation. Overall ExperienceIn the grand scheme of things I did not really use the laptop that much. It might sound like I didn't try hard enough or was just too much of a pussy to use a CLI but the reality of it is just I didn't really feel that compelled to use it for anything more than just what I needed to use it for. Maybe that is all for the best though. It's not like people back in the 90's used their computers like we use ours today. The internet simply wasn't built for that and the people that were chronically online must've had an expensive ass phone bill until broadband became a thing. Maybe once you take the flashy colors of a GUI away and strip everything down to bare text you really start to understand what drew you in to begin with. The internet can be fun, but maybe we should rethink what it was really meant to do. I don't intend to give up on this though. If you want to try this yourself or already do I'll be posting some links to decent command line based programs pretty soon. |