Following up on a chat I had with Anti about how Antix really means"Anti-X", meaning: Anti-X windows server, completely cli-app based, I have been spending quite a bit of time fooling around outside of the x server.

I've been doing this in my old dell laptop (about 12 years old, 256 M; 25 G drive). It's been mostly fun. Here are a couple of screenshots showing antix without X running window managers.

The first one is a window manager called twin. In the shot I'm showing 5"windowns" running newsbeuter, ranger (the file manger) playing an audio file, vim, htop, and a final window to do fbgrab and capture the screen. Notice the ram use (even playing an mp3) is 53 M. I like the layout of twin, but moving the windows/resizing is a bit cumbersome since I have to hit the"Pause" key to bring up a menu. Also, I'm having a strange problem with elinks in twin. While newsbeuter will call up elinks fine, even in twin, if I call up twin from a terminal in twin, it causes a segmentation fault.





The other window manager I have tried, is call dvtm and I also include a picture, running the same 5 terminals as in twin. It uses up a bit more RAM, but the window layout is patterned after dwm (which I'm very comfortable with). Also, eliniks does not have a problem with dvtm.




I've also been able to configure mplayer so that it plays a movie (out of X of course) using ranger file manager (or the terminal). I've also been able to open a pdf and the resolution is pretty good. Same with opening pictures from ranger.

I'll post any further developments. I hope this advances Anti's evil cause of ridding the world of the evil influence of X windows __{{emoticon}}__

Pedro

"evil cause" ? __{{emoticon}}__

Great post pedro.
So would you recommend dvtm over twin?

I think than if someone installed antiX-core and then added the cli apps, then RAM usage might be even less.
The cli-installer in antiX-core will definitely work and install with a box with 48MB RAM (and if you are lucky maybe less, but certainly not lower than 32MB) as drg has shown in his tests.

Let us know how you are getting on going anti-X.

I'd like to play with both twin and dvtm for a bit longer before recommending either one. Certainly twin uses us less memory, but the segmentation fault problem continues with elinks and then messes up even my ability to run dvtm so that I end up rebooting. Yet, it is very fast and very small so maybe I can figure out what the problem is.

Here's a shot of twin with 3 terminals open: one for htop; one to run an mplayer command; and one for a frame grab. Notice that even with a movie running (which is runs quite nicely), only 32 M are being used. That's pretty impressive, iin my opinion. In case anyone else is interested, to get mplayer to run movies out of x server, you need framebuffer installed and then:

mplayer -vo fbdev filename

Alternatively, you can create a file /.mplayer/config where you put in a line:

vo=fbdev

and this will allow you to just time mplayer filename. Not sure what happens if I run mplayer from inside X with the config set to frame buffer, since I haven't tried it yet.

I haven't been able to figure out how to control screen position for the mplayer output. Mabye some one else knows. Upper left is a problem since it interferes with the twin comman bar. It would be really sweet if I could move around the movie like a regular window.

Here's a picture:




By the way, I am very impressed with fbgrab and I would strongly recommend it for taking screenshots out of X.

At any rate, this has been a learning experience for me and a fun one!

Pedro

Thanks for the extra info.

Just wondering, are you able to do all your latex work out of X and still be able to check the output?

Heh, feeling ambitious arent we? __{{emoticon}}__

I haven't upgraded vi-tiny to full vim with vim-latex suite yet. Checking the dvi or pdf would be the issue. I think it should work with the fbgs script. As a matter of fact, I know the script works well already. How well it will handle multple pages of pdf conversion is a different matter. Here's the link


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/index.html"
linktext was:"http://linux.bytesex.org/fbida/index.html"
====================================


I also installed R (the statistical software) and it runs well outside of x, except of the output (often one wants to see plots of data). Apparently there's a way to run it outside of X, but it's tricky. So, the stats will run and I can probably generate jpgs which I can then check using ranger file manager. While all of this is possible, the hassle factor does increase and once starts to reach diminishing returns. Still, it's fun to try.

I'll play around with vim-latex (I'm pretty sure it will work) and will try to post a shot with a pdf generated from vim-latex.

Pedro

Thanks again, and another question.

When you install latex, do you use the meta-installer included in antiX?
If so/not, do you think the meta-installer latex options are ok?

As I remember, I installed latex in my work laptop from synaptic, not the installer. There are lots of options for packages etc, in latex. I'll give the installer a try and see how that works.

plvera,

I did a little googling and found this command line switch for mplayer that might be what you are looking for on the starting position.

-geometry x[%][:y[%]] or [WxH][+x+y]
Adjust where the output is on the screen initially. The x and y specifications are in pixels measured from the top-right of the screen to the top-right of the image being displayed, however if a percentage sign is given after the argument it turns the value into a percentage of the screen size in that direction. It also supports the standard option format to the standard X -geometry option. The values given must be integers.
Note: This option is only supported by a few vo's, including tdfxfb, fbdev and xv.

you can see some examples on this page. its from the tivo-mplayer page, but I bet its valid.


========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://tivo-mplayer.sourceforge.net/docs/mplayer-man.html"
linktext was:"http://tivo-mplayer.sourceforge.net/doc ... r-man.html"
====================================

dolphin_oracle:

Thanks for the tip. I changed the .mplayer/config file to include:

geometry=0%:5%

and it works like a charm!

Just an update on viewing pdf files out of x.

fbgs works pretty well, It's a wrapper that converts ps/pdf files to ghostcript (I think) and calls fbi (an image file viewer). If I type:

fbgs -c -xxl filename.pdf

it will generate an image (in color; that's the -c flag) and with a resolution of 150 dpi (xxl flag). it's not great in terms of resolution, just good enough.

The problem is that it can't run inside dvtm or twin. So, it has to run in a plain console. I find that very inconvenient, particularly when using vim-latex, or anything else.

Still, both fbgs and fbi work pretty reliably. I'd like to find a better alternative with even better resolution.