I had a gparted mishap in my previous install (maybe all those warning about backing up before repartitioning are true after all), so I have to reinstall Antix in my old dell laptop, where I had been playing outside of X.

I decided to install Antix-core and just a few apps. So far, this is what I've installed:

1) elinks
2) dvtm - window manager (behaves much like dwm)
3) vim
4) fbi - graphics viewer for framebuffer
5) mplayer
6) rtorrent
7) muttt - my favorite email client (behaves much like vim)
__{{emoticon}}__ fbgrab - to take screenshots
9) ranger - file manager (a very nice app)
10) rss2email - this is a cool app that will email RSS feeds so that I can read them with mutt (and don't have to install newsbeuter or any other RSS reader).
- this is very easy to configure and I have it set to check for feeds 15 min past the hour using crontab

I had been testing dvtm vs twin window manager in my previous system. I really like twin because: 1) it uses up less memory than dvtm; 2) allows with individual window sizing; 3) just plain looks better. However, in my experience, I found twin prone to crash so I gave up on it. (it's also meant to run better inside X).

I discovered gnu screen , which maybe got pulled in with dvtm, but is a very nice tiling window manager. It's highly configurable, uses up less RAM and I can size windows independently. I haven't become fullly familiar with screen yet, but I really like it.

I enclose a picture of my system with gnu screen, running 5 windows, and also a picture of dvtm with 5 windows (and the same apps running in both). Note the smaller RAM use in screen.


Antix core with gnu screen




Antix core with dvtm



One problem that I have not been able to solve with any window manager is that I can't run graphics apps within the windows. I get an error message about not being a linux console. I'll try to capture it and post it and maybe someone can figure it out. If I can get graphics going while running multiple windows, it would add a great deal of functionality.

Anyway, I'm still having fun playing outside of X.

Pedro

As an update. I found a graphics viewer that plays nicely with screen: fim. Stands for fbi improved. I had been working with fbi, and while perfectly fine outside of screen, it wouldn't work in screen or any other window manager. fim will also handle pdfs very nicely.

Fim is in the repos, but I had to enable testing non-free which was turned in the default core install. To use,

for a picture: fim *.png (or whatever)
for a pdf: fimgs *.pdf

Here are 2 more pictures, one with screen running ranger, mutt, htop and an extra window. In ranger, I am about to call up

fimgs

Here's a shot of fim displaying a pdf file. It's a slide I created a long time ago using latex and the beamer pakage. One problem I noticed, is that htop will continue to refresh the screen over fim (you can see the numbers displayed). That's a bit annoying, so I hope I can find a solution to this.



The resolution is very nice, and other than the annoying refresh problem, I'm very happy with fim and screen. I haven't tested it yet, but fim should work with dvtm (or twin window manager).

I think that this ability to view pictures and pdfs from screen is a great addition.

Pedro

Well done! I found this very helpful when going X-less. __{{emoticon}}__


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Foxhound,

thanks for the link. That is a great website. Here's another one I found listing cli apps


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plvera,

your adventures with an x-less system are some of my favorite posts of late. Thanks for the updates! It really gets me thinking about some of my"old junk" laying around __{{emoticon}}__

Dolphin_oracle:

Thanks for the encouraging comment. I'm having a great time learning about all these apps and getting this rather old box with limited resources, to handle itself very well. In addition, I'm learning a fair amount also.

Here's an update on screen. I have been using screen a lot (almost exclusively) and have tried different configurations of the screenrc file. Getting the syntax down is rather arcane and cumbersome. Then I found a script that will let me configure screen in a very clear and easy way. It will even change the key bindings.

The program is called byobu and here's the link:


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I used the install instruction for the deb package and it worked just fine. And so, to start this program just type"byobu" and screen (souped up nicely) comes up. If you don't want to use byobu then just type screen and your regular .screenrc file will kick in.

Here's a screenshot of the main byobu configuration menu:



And here's a shot of what the new screen looks like, with 3 windows open.



There are lots of options on what information to display and the color configurations. I especially like the highlight for the active window right at the window being used. Yiou can also decide how many windows you want to open automatically and what apps to run in those windows also. I havent played with creating regions with byobu but it should work just as well, just a matter of adding them to the byobu config file.

And now screen look real spiffy and it was really easy to set up. Is that neat or what??

Pedro

Pedro,

You've got me interested in retrying some of these adventures, I'll have to take a serious look at some of these tiling wm for my old laptop, although it still plays nice with antiX, and I still have a sidux, uh aptosid Xfce version there, fully du with latest kernel and it still works great, even tho I really don't care much for Xfce. But looks like your having fun and we appreciate your detailing this info for us.
Thank you,

cheers,
ohh

Hmm. Anti-X, the arcane meanings.

Hi, my name is drg, and I am a delinquent cli junkie. I have
gone over to the gui side this last while, it was that VorTex1
wallpaper that did me in, but I can stop any time I want.

Zgv –graphics viewer, can do eg an album of photos

Green –pdf viewer

Spreadsheets!
Sc –spreadsheet calculator

Teapot – Table Editor And Planner. Needs to be compiled, which I couldn’t work out. If you or anyone is interested and successful, please let me know how (I do know the basics)..

Drg:
Thanks for pointing out those apps.
As far as Teapot, I haven't tried it, but I'll give it a test run and see if I can get it to work. It looks like a very viable alternative to excel.

You mentioned that you had to compile it, but I found this website that lists deb packages.


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I'll install a deb package tonight and see if it works.

Pedro

Drg:

I downloaded and installed the deb package for Teapot and it seems to be working fine. No man pages were installed. If you have a link to some documentation, it would be very helpful.

F10 brings up a menu, and ctl-c gets you out of the menu.

I noticed one odd thing. If I enter the number 22 in a cell, only 2 is displayed (but the actual value stored is 22). If I enter 22. (or 22.0) then 22 is displayed. There are probably a lot of commands and configurations that I don't know about.

Here's a screenshot of teapot (running in screen)

plvera, thanks for url for teapot-2.2.0-Linux-x86.deb. I had an earlier version, serves me right for not searching again. Pdf and html manuals are in /usr/share/doc/teapot. mc with lynx also works for viewing. “instead of PostScript/dvi/whatever output, there are interfaces to troff/tbl and LaTeX and HTML and CSV files can be generated. The latter is a very popular interface for graphics software.” Also their site gives links to these same manuals.


I figure spreadsheets fit into the graphics section of our freeforum. Graphs (aka plotting data) made a lot of money for Lotus and Borland; the brandnames 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro (ie 4) pushed this feature, and existed in text-only dos well before Excel.

Gotta look into using comma-separated-value (csv) files, good for integrating into databases like mysql.

******************

genius
gnome-genius (gui version, for decent plotting) -from debian, with links to more similar apps.

“Genius is a general purpose calculator program similar in some aspects to BC, Matlab, Maple or Mathematica. It is useful both as a simple calculator and as a research or educational tool. The syntax is very intuitive and is designed to mimic how mathematics is usually written.”

Yikes, this can lead on to more tough stuff.
LaTeX, troff , MathML gnuplot, what else!

Drg,

thanks for pointing out the location of the doc files for teapot.

I havent worked with gnuplot, but I understand it's very popular. For graphs, I have been using R (the statistical software language). I have bee using R for a while now to do statistical analyses and create accompanying graphs. It's a very powerful package and I've been very happy with it.

You mentioned latex. In fact, I have switched over entirely to latex for documents. I have used it now successfully for journal articles, book chapters, and even grant applications (large documents, about 25 pages, single types, with lots of pictures,graphs). In fact, these days, I used vim to write the text (with latex markup), compile within vim (using the vim-latex-suite plugin) to create pdfs, and using R (also from vim using a plugin) to analyse data and produce graphs.

I think gnuplot would be fun to try. Havent even heard of troff or MathML. You're right! There is a lot of stuff out there!

Pedro

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may interest you guys.

Secipolla:
Was there supposed to be a link with the post? or an image?
Sorry,but I don't see anything after the your comment.

Pedro

The link is on the word"This"