Some time ago I started to look more in the TTY and how can I be productive,
without having a fancy Desktop environment. So Today was the last missing
peace in the puzzle - A browser with graphics and mouse without
Xserver. But let's see what are all the other preparations to come to this last cool feature.
The cyrilic terminal
I write often in cyrillic (you know - Bulgarians always do), so First thing
to do was to make keyboard layout switching between English (USA) and
Bulgarian (Phonetic) keyboards. This is easily done with the cyr program.
To install it in Ubuntu you need the package console-cyrillic - just:
sudo apt-get install console-cyrillic
# To configure it:
cyr bg_phon alt_shift_toggle --encoding=utf-8 --save
That's all to change your keyboard layout from EN to BG with Alt+Shift keys.
More then one program in TTY
To use more then one application in a single TTY and to have the ability to switch between them you will need screen. Ubuntu provides a cool
modification called byobu. Just start it
and then you can create as many screens as your want with the key-combo
Ctrl+a+c and ofcourse switch between them with Ctrl+a+n (for next), or Ctrl+a+p (for previous) or just Ctrl+a+# (where # is the number of the screen).
You emails in one application
This was the hint from my university (FH Cologne). There
we used the AIX Unix system, and the mail client there was called pine, but the more
up-to-date branch of this easy to use terminal application in the Linux world is
called alpine. In difference to other such programs like mutt - alpine is very easy
to use, and provides a lot of configuration options. On the Internet are lot's of
tutorials how to setup alpine to use gmail so I will skip that part.
Connect with other people
Emailing is probably the best option to stay in contact with your friends and colages
while using the TTY, but sometimes for a fast help or just relax for a couple of
minutes with a nice conversation then there are irssi for
(IRC Networks) and finch (the
ncurses based version of Pidgin - MSN/Jabber/Google/ICQ etc.). You just need to
install them and configure, but that's really the easy part. For people coming from
the windowed-desktop can be very hard to get used to the keyboard for everything.
Nobody can help you here, just start practicing - you will find it handy in no time.
Rock'n'roll that terminal
Music is not only for relaxing, it's part of everything, so we have to be able to
listen some of our mp3s/wavs and so on. Here are 2 solutions that I find perfect.
The one is mocp - provides a music server and client in one.
This gives you the power to listen music even switching between TTYs. Mocp plays the
music in the backend. The other cool player is cmus
an easy to use console music player, with some cool features like replay-gain. The
only problem is that your should compile it from sources if you use Ubuntu 10.04 like
me. But if you are going to use the TTY for a whole day, it shouldn't be a big problem
just a bit more of apt-cache searches and ''./configure''s :).
Videos in the framebuffer
So after finishing work a nice movie would be great. Here comes the powerful
mplayer. Yeah mplayer is everywhere! Here is a little
bit tricky, but it's not impossible. First you need to configure your framebuffer:
sudo apt-get install fbset
With the fbset tool you do it automaticly. Just running fbset (as root) with start it
Next thing is opening the movie with mplayer. I made myself a simple bash script for
this:
#!/bin/bash
# First parameter is the movie
# Second optional is the subtitles encoding
# Third optional is the video size for the fullscreen
mplayer -vo fbdev $1 -fs -subcp ${2:-cp1251} -vf scale=${3:-1280:720}
The webbrowser with graphics
At least the browser. The answer is links2 and the package gpm. The gpm tool enables
for you the using of the mouse in the framebuffer. To configure your mouse in TTY:
# for USB mouse
gpm -m /dev/input/mice -m imps2
And then the magic for starting links2 is with the option ''-driver'' like so:
Well that's it. I will not cover the text editing etc. It's just Vim.
and nothing more. And some self-made scripts one of them based on the awesome
library for python fabulous for color output
in the terminal and a neat feature to trace PNG images and display them:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from fabulous import image
print image.Image('/path/to/your/image.png')
That's all.
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