Using linux without a desktop environment

[anomie]

I kinda like the idea of Xfce

Yep, it's great for an older system. I had it running nicely (very quick) on an AMD K6-2 450Mhz with 256MB RAM.

[valan]

CLI capability is up there with GUI, until you get into multimedia - watching videos for example. Yes, you can watch ascii art videos, but that is silly to me. Same goes for viewing and editing photos - that is where GUI is obviously much better.

Just as with web browsing, you in no way need X to have a fully graphical time viewing pictures or watching movies. This can all be done happily in cli.

[bryansmith]

MP3's - use mpg321 to play them.

I don't use X on my Slack partition and I love it. I am slowly getting used to it but find it to be very efficient.

Bryan

What do you use your slack partition for??

It's a build ground for a LiveCD I am currently working on.

Bryan

[Ethyriel]

Valan, what do you use to view videos in the console? I haven't come across any fb video players, so I'm curious. I know there's fbv, zgv, and fbi for photos...

Too bad I can't seem to get my framebuffer working properly. At least I can't get w3m or links working with it, I'm trying fbi and svgalib this weekend. It's really starting to get to me, to the point where I might even switch distros over it. Too bad I'd go insane without Arch's speedy boots.

[valan]

I believe mplayer has a cli mode, and xine also has a cli front end. Or if you like it in ascii (sorry if you do) you can use aaxine.

[Ethyriel]

Wow, crazy... I use mplayer all the time and I never realized it could use the framebuffer. That'll teach me not to read man pages.

Now I just need a decent text mode web browser with image support and I can get rid of X completely (or at least not start it)
I got w3m working with inline images... god I wish I didn't waste so much time getting it to compile. Actually it compiled right away, it was a bug in Arch's ABS holding me back, not tarballing the stuff that goes into libexec.