'ellow, That's an interesting idea; I have thought about going console-only as pretty much the only X apps I use are Evolution, Gaim, the GNOME Panel, metacity and loadsa gnome-terminals.
I have heard that mutt is a great mailer and there are framebuffer (or ASCII art!) programs to view graphic attachments with. You can also watch DVDs and play Quake in ASCII modes (or the framebuffer). (Actually, there are a lot of amazing games known as ``Interactive Fiction'' -- text adventures -- that will run in the console perfectly. Some do have incidental sound and/or graphics.) There is a large number of people who use only text mode; blind Linux/BSD users often only need Emaspeak (http://emacspeak.sf.net) to do everything with their computers (as is the extensible nature of Emacs; it can do much more than just text editing). Personally I prefer the elegance of vim. If you replaced init with Emacs you might not even notice the difference -- surely it's almost an OS by now, only really missing a kernel? :-) Anyway, back to your point. I think that it would be very easy to get used to a system that only had text output. Depending on the size of your consoles you could even watch films in colour ASCII art. Although not Debian related, you might be interested in http://oralux.org/ -- its an audio-only Linux distro (i.e. for the vision impaired) and should give you an idea of the types of programs you could use to replace your X stuff. Even ALSA has an ncurses mixer and there is a command-line mpd (music player daemon [very cool]) client. For web-browsing, there's Elinks, too. Finally, you might want to visit http://www.textfiles.com/ and check out the top 100. All sorts of interesting stuff can be found on that site (and all of it is in plain text files). Hope this helps / is of interest! bye just now, -- Matthew T. Atkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
