«

Some of you may remember I was thinking of taking on a linux course.
Well, I did. I think I have reached one of those Eureka moments.

Tell me if Im wrong. Im thinking of my old Dos days. I started using
computers pre windows where I used a menu driven system. Which was a
handy tool for less, shall we say educated computer users. Anyway, I,
as did most of us back then I got around a commuter using the command
line prompt. Now, I think I have become brainwashed with windows. In
that, my thinking is that linux uses a "graphical interface". Eg;
mandrake, or red hat, what ever. So, would I be right in thinkin that
if I wanted to use linux on this machine, then I would not need a
graphical interface.? In other words, were I to use linux, I could just
think of the old way of doing it using the command line to access email,
browser, what ever. And if I wanted to I could set up say a page in a
word processor, put in a few hyper links for the proggys I use and
insert in the execute file on start up to access that page I have put
the said hyper links into. Im thinking of the family around here.

To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram
etc, and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1
with say 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with
bloody great graphics or something.


Your thoughts ?

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:06:28 +1200, Troglodyte wrote:

> Some of you may remember I was thinking of taking on a linux course. Well,
> I did. I think I have reached one of those Eureka moments.

<snipped gui-less musings>

> To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram etc,
> and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1 with say
> 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with bloody great
> graphics or something.

Yep, that can all be done. There are console newsreaders, mail clients,
web browsers etc.

Of course you won't see any graphics when browsing the web in Lynx or
Links though. And it will make you realise just how bad the average
standard of HTML coding is out there

You can also multitask by either running processes in the background or
switching to another virtual terminal etc.

Cheers
Anton

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:06:28 +1200, Troglodyte wrote:

> To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram
> etc, and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1
> with say 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with
> bloody great graphics or something.

I recently ran SuSE Linux 7.0 with no GUI on a 486DX-66 with 16MB of RAM.

It ran just fine.

Midnight Commander ("mc") provides a very useful "xtree"-like interface
and set of functions.

You can use Lynx as the browser (text-based) and slrn as the newsreader.

E-mail can be Pine - which works really well.

Go for it.

Steve

"Troglodyte" <> wrote in message
news:412d0b17$...
> Some of you may remember I was thinking of taking on a linux course. Well,
> I did. I think I have reached one of those Eureka moments.
>
> Tell me if Im wrong. Im thinking of my old Dos days. I started using
> computers pre windows where I used a menu driven system. Which was a
> handy tool for less, shall we say educated computer users. Anyway, I, as
> did most of us back then I got around a commuter using the command line
> prompt. Now, I think I have become brainwashed with windows. In that, my
> thinking is that linux uses a "graphical interface". Eg; mandrake, or red
> hat, what ever. So, would I be right in thinkin that if I wanted to use
> linux on this machine, then I would not need a graphical interface.? In
> other words, were I to use linux, I could just think of the old way of
> doing it using the command line to access email, browser, what ever. And
> if I wanted to I could set up say a page in a word processor, put in a few
> hyper links for the proggys I use and insert in the execute file on start
> up to access that page I have put the said hyper links into. Im thinking
> of the family around here.
>
> To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram etc,
> and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1 with say
> 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with bloody great
> graphics or something.
>
>
> Your thoughts ?

You would probably get away with 8 megs of ram for text console only
There are plenty of text and ncurses console apps for mail news browser
For mail there is pine and mutt http://www.mutt.org/ for news slrn
http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ and elinks http://elinks.or.cz/ as a browser
mp3blaster as an mp3 player, http://www.kitenet.net/programs/pdmenu/ as a
menu, Midnight Commander as a file manager, jed as an editor. Most of them
even support a mouse with gpm
64megs is enough for X11 as long as you don't want to run with all the fx
enabled on KDE or Gnome. If you use fluxbox or icewm or windowmaker it'll do
mozilla and abiword and sylpheed and pan and xmms etc
Try it all, its the only way to learn.

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:05:01 +1200, theseus wrote:

> You would probably get away with 8 megs of ram for text console only

Though you would not want to try to compile any software using current
versions of the gcc compiler.

Your hard drive might drill a hole in the floor as it swapped all day.

"steve" <> wrote in message
news g.nz...
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 13:05:01 +1200, theseus wrote:
>
>> You would probably get away with 8 megs of ram for text console only
>
> Though you would not want to try to compile any software using current
> versions of the gcc compiler.
>
> Your hard drive might drill a hole in the floor as it swapped all day.
>
>

Obviously
But you could run this http://www.woalf.uklinux.net/index.html

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:32:21 +1200, steve <>
wrote:

>On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:06:28 +1200, Troglodyte wrote:
>
>> To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram
>> etc, and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1
>> with say 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with
>> bloody great graphics or something.
>
>I recently ran SuSE Linux 7.0 with no GUI on a 486DX-66 with 16MB of RAM.
>
>It ran just fine.
>
>Midnight Commander ("mc") provides a very useful "xtree"-like interface
>and set of functions.
>
>You can use Lynx as the browser (text-based) and slrn as the newsreader.
>
>E-mail can be Pine - which works really well.
>
I was with you until then, Steve.

Cheers,

Cliff

Enkidu wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:32:21 +1200, steve <>
> wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 10:06:28 +1200, Troglodyte wrote:
>>
>>> To that end you would not need a computer with much in the way or ram
>>> etc, and so using much less in the way of recourses. Like an Pentium1
>>> with say 64 megs or ram ? Less of course your mucking around with
>>> bloody great graphics or something.
>>
>>I recently ran SuSE Linux 7.0 with no GUI on a 486DX-66 with 16MB of RAM.
>>
>>It ran just fine.
>>
>>Midnight Commander ("mc") provides a very useful "xtree"-like interface
>>and set of functions.
>>
>>You can use Lynx as the browser (text-based) and slrn as the newsreader.
>>
>>E-mail can be Pine - which works really well.
>>
> I was with you until then, Steve.

LOL!!

It's OK!

mutt is OK, too....but I'm not used mutt as a pop client....whereas I know
(or thought I knew) that pine could be a pop client.