Basic minimal computing

[RandomCharacter]

I am in way over my head with this group. I am apparently too dumb to grasp the basics of minimal computing, while most of everyone else here seems to be at the PhD level. I read the threads and appreciate how you are doing things, but I don't have the basic knowledge to follow in to what you are doing.

I thought I did. For many years as a professional, I worked with BellCore UNIX, HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX systems. In my early years with BellCore UNIX, I worked from a physical TTY (a big, fancy, wired typewriter) for I/O. Now, I almost always use vi as my editor and I do package management, file management, etc almost exclusively from the CLI. But it's not nearly enough to follow along in the land of frame buffers and other things that seem esoteric to me.

Are there any tutorials you can recommend to bring me up to speed? I don't think I need to be spoon fed, I am a pretty smart guy. I just don't know where to start. Last night, I searched on "minimal Linux", and that just basically pointed me to distros. I have a distro (currently n00b killah), but I rarely use it because I don't really know what to do with it. So, give me some ideas where to start learning about this secret world.

Tim

[wuxmedia]

Well - if you don't want use it, then really you won't have much motivation to play with it. 8)
Maybe start with an objective. Then go from there, for example Joe's coup de grace thread in #! is good for a bunch of cli tools, and tracks his use of FBterm...
of course bacons work in the FB releases such as >> Baby U << is a shining example of what can be done.
depends on what you need doing really, as you are happy with file management in cli. Like I needed to back up a load of files today by remote rsyncing - i didn't need to boot into X at all.
So for me, minimal computing depends on your needs, if you need a 'normal' webrowser, and a bunch of GTK apps, then that's your minimal.

[ivanovnegro]

I think this thread is a pretty good start, at least for the frame buffer thing.

Though Tim we are just having fun here. I am not sure what you want to know. ;) Basically, what we do here is trying to work outside X, not sure if that is minimalist enough, you can be minimalist in X, too, even in KDE you could just do CLI, is that minimalist computing, not sure.

If you want to know a bit of the "philosophy" behind I would read Joe's blog:

http://debianjoe.wordpress.com/

and probably some others we have at our start page:

http://www.linuxbbq.org/start.html

[DebianJoe]

Let's go ahead and define what you mean by "minimal" first. I've written a LOT about this subject >http://debianjoe.wordpress.com/2013/10/ ... inimalism/..but there is "resource sparse minimalism" and "design minimalism." They're not identical.

For example, Pidsley has many xserver builds that are easier on RAM use than my framebuffer stuff. What is your goal Tim? If it's to just become a beast with n00b-killah, then you'll just need to learn more about the tools that are included with it. I'd include some of the coreutils as essential to mastering the art, but with some AIX background, that won't be a big stretch.

If you want to master framebuffer, then you need a working /dev/fb0 build. Go HERE and start at step #4,get your framebuffer rocking, and we'll go from there.

Edit: Whoa, me and Ivan almost wrote the same thing at the same time.

[bones]

Don't feel bad, Tim, I can barely keep up myself, especially since I choose to use Slackware and OpenBSD, mostly, instead of Debian sid, like most here. Things are just different enough, in many cases, to leave me floundering on my own. But then, things are similar enough (it's all *NIX, after all), that I can usually find my way, with lots of web searching. And asking here helps, of course. Like when I asked about Pidsley's env-info script, and found that it differed slightly in usage in Slackware than what others were experiencing in EVERY OTHER distro!

I have found that just experimenting with what interests you, keeping copious notes (the hardcopy kind with pen and paper), and always having a stable rig to turn to when you bork the one you're experimenting on, helps.

At the end of the day, do what works best for you, and don't worry too much about what others are doing. And don't be afraid to ask (smart) questions.

[ivanovnegro]

@Joe: True :) but you added also your thread, that is a good read.

[wuxmedia]

yes, great recipe Joe, good to clarify the needs.
At work, apparently, a recent ubuntu install is the default.
Because they know it works with the hardware, for servers it's centos or debian stable (or very old stable)

[pidsley]

Assume "in my opinion" in front of everything I am about to say.

Now, I almost always use vi as my editor and I do package management, file management, etc almost exclusively from the CLI.

You are already doing more "minimal computing" than most people. I think "minimal computing" is a frame of mind, similar to the "Voluntary Simplicity" lifestyle movement. I think the framebuffer builds are pretty, but to me they are just tmux with a nice background. I boot to tmux, but without a framebuffer.

Minimal computing means asking yourself what you can do without. Can you boot your system to a command prompt (no X) and do what you need? Do it. StartX only when you need X to do what you want. In X, can you do without a panel, or conky, or a DE and just use a minimal WM? Can you start with a netinstall or Tiny/Bass, and just install what you think you need? Seeing the dependencies pulled in by everything you add is always instructive. Always consider what you have, and what you really need. This will be different for everyone. I use conky on my desktop, but I use ratpoison. My system, my choices. And "minimal" is not always equivalent to "better."

As bones says, do what works best for you, and don't worry too much about what others are doing.

[bones]

I boot to tmux, but without a framebuffer.

In fact, this is how I spend most of my time in Slackware: tmux, no framebuffer. The first scrot I posted in the "NoX" thread is exactly that.

[dkeg]

very well said everyone. That's what we do here. We may test and push forward just to conquer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that is what is used daily. Plus, you use what works, we don't judge like that. We judge other stuff like effort, respect, manners, and sharing. And like pids says, there are times when X isn't need and can just work right in tty, maybe invoking tmux depending.

For me typically I work in cli in workspace '1', and browser in workspace '2'. That's about it.

[pidsley]

For me typically I work in cli in workspace '1', and browser in workspace '2'. That's about it.

This. Look at my ratpoison scrots. I have urxvt with tmux full-frame in one window, firefox in another. Sometimes I have claws-mail in a third full-frame window.

Plus, you use what works, we don't judge like that. We judge other stuff like effort, respect, manners, and sharing.

And this.

[DebianJoe]

Ironically, we all do almost the exact same thing it would appear. I very often use a tiler (dwm or hcwm in X) normally with my editor and terminal emulator in workspace 1...and a browser open fullscreen in #2.

...there's probably something to this being useful since we seem to have similar practices.

Edit: And I use stackers and framebuffer builds because they're aesthetically pleasing. No reason to lie about it. I think they look cool.

[wuxmedia]

wow, I use the same, for me, in i3wm workspace switching with alt-1 and alt-2 is not a stretch of the fingers, alt-3 for thunderbird (which i must change) sometimes alt4 for a Filezilla to test users FTP access.

[RandomCharacter]

Thanks very much for all of the replies. I will work my way through them and absorb what I can.

I agree, I need some more specific goals. I see you all doing cool things, and I think, wow, I wish I could do that. But maybe I'm not sure why. I guess I just wish I was just more of a "guru" than what I have managed to become.

Last night, I was thrown by a seemingly simple problem. I cannot mount my iPod Touch. I was working with the Debian wiki article on iPhone. Everything checked out except the actual mount. I become very irritated by all the levels of software that are doing things I don't know about or really even understand. To be more specific, udev and dbus, not to mention console kit and logind. In short, everything going on in my system seems to be a tangled mess that is outside my knowledge and control.

That sort of explains my desire for a more minimal environment. To me, a large part of my love of FOSS is the Stallman-like desire to control my own system. I am no where near that level. But I would like to get closer.

Again, I will go through all your tips and try to get more "up to speed". Thank you all.

Tim

[machinebacon]

First of all, I agree with everything that has been said before. No matter how you use your system, you are not better or worse just for taking a certain work environment. It is more about how you want to get what stuff done.

In a very easy example: you want to read an article on wikipedia. You could boot into a full-blown graphical environment, wait for all things to initialize, then click on Chromium/Firefox, wait a few seconds for it to open, then enter the URL in the address bar, then search the term in wikipedia, then finally read the article.
I would use this (saved as /usr/local/bin/wiki):

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
for i in "$@"; do
        elinks http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search="$@";
done

where in a terminal (any will do, also tty) i simply use wiki "Crop rotation". Of course anything like this does not make much sense if the website you visit relies heavily on active elements.

Another aspect is distraction. And I think this is why most of us prefer to have the "two-workspace sytem" (and I, too, have workspace 1 with a tmux and workspace 2 with a browser, if I am in X). My screens are all comparably small (nothing is >15"), so I rather prefer workspace switching than tiling or stacking (which makes it harder to track windows that are cluttered over different desktops/workspaces). tmux is great for this, because it is a tiler with workspace switch. By using tmux I don't really care which DE/WM I am working in, because I control tmux's sessions, and not the DE itself.

Once there was a discussion over at #! forums about 'how lightweight can #! get', and somebody (sunfizz) posted some ideas how to unbloat the system. He made a list, like

file manager: pcmanfm
terminal: sakura
browser: luakit
media player: mplayer2
...

or something like this. Later on, "el_koraco" posted something in response to this, like

file manager: cp, mv, mkdir, rm
terminal: tty
browser: curl, wget
media player: aplay

and he hit the nail on the head, IMO. Any bare-bone Linux/UNIX/BSD system comes with a huge toolkit loaded, even more than we need for everyday computing, and everything else we seem to need from the repos is just an additional layer of <abstraction/bloat/"functionality"/"user-friendliness"> that might or might not be needed by the user. I like the idea of having one thing for a certain task, and chaining these things to have a certain function, rather than searching for a ready-made application that adds stuff that its developer needed to create his software. But that's just my opinion, and I would not apply this rule to, for example my mother, who is mostly using her Win7 computer to watch youtube videos and read blogs :) She would never use elinks (or anything similar) to extract the info she needs from a website, and she would never grep/sed/awk anything, because her needs are different. It all makes sense if we first check our own workflow, or what we are trying to achieve when using the computer, and then decide on how we want to set it up.

I wrote about this here: http://linuxbbq.org/blog/, and I also recommend Joe's blog, and http://inconsolation.wordpress.com/

We could write much more, because the topic is huge (much bigger, IMO, than talking about a GUI environment), as this is more a question of philosophy than a technical question.

About your iPod, you need usbmuxd from the repos :)

[RandomCharacter]

Great post, MB.

Also, I do have usbmuxd and I was running it when I was trying to get the iPod mounted. Thanks.

Tim

[machinebacon]

Maybe the gtkpod application if you are already in X? Or this: https://wiki.debian.org/iPhone

[GekkoP]

Can't add too much to what has already been said. If I got the system I'm typing from right now, is because I had patience and curiosity enough to try what I find here. I don't have your background, Tim. Honestly, I've been using Linux-only PCs everyday since early 2008. I came from Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora and #!, and the first days here I was completely blown away but the amount of stuff I didn't know. I still am, actually, but I'm getting better and better.
It's not a matter of minimalism to me. It's a matter of finding the setup I need everyday discovering simpler and nicest ways to do it.

[rust collector]

Tim, I have the same feeling some times. I just don't know enough about what x1 or x2 does, and how to make it do what I want.
In my case, I think the problem is that I don't really have any real use for the computer at all, I just like playing with it, so I do not have a goal to work towards.

I think the other problem I have, is all the alternative ways to do "something"
Now, that is a good thing, but it gets confusing.

[machinebacon]

Let's be honest - if there was no internet (or no browser), most of us would get pretty bored with the computer.

But it is absolutely right, we are doing the same thing in different ways, to each his own. OTOH, it doesn't hurt to know how to move around the files ystem without a GUI file manager, especially for automated tasks or batch convert/rename/...