On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Seth Dimbert wrote:

> the GUI (ie, KDE, Gnome, etc). If I've installed a GUI, then I can use the
> machine instead of a Windows or MacOS machine, with access to open source
> office apps, graphics apps, communications apps, etc. Or, if I've installed
> a GUI-less system, I can run server apps, like httpd, ftpd, telnetd, etc.

There is a wonderful world to explore from the console.  When running text 
based applications, you can detatch your session from the terminal and 
carry on later from another machine somewhere else on the internet.  
"screen" is a nice package that lets you have multiple sessions in one 
terminal that can be detatched, or bring up the same application on dozens 
of workstations at the same time (start with the -x option.)

Mail: pine, mutt
News: tin, slrn
Editors: emacs, vim
Publishing: latex
Images: fbi
Video: DFBSee

And most people don't know about these SVGA or framebuffer applications.  
Its a minimalistic world where speed rules.  These applications can often
be found from the author's websites and from informal blurbs in sourecode
documentation.  Since not everyone uses them, they may not be reliable
with all video cards (root access for video hardware and if it crashes, it
locks up hard...)

http://www.svgalib.org/

How old is your machine?  Does it have at least 16MB of memory and 1MB of 
video memory?  I remember old versions of the SUSE distribution have a 
full featured Xwindows desktop that works pretty well on a slow 486.  
Netscape takes a few minutes to start up, but the result is very usable.

I only use xwindows for management of xterms.  Everything can be done 
better in a text window anyways.  Why hunt something down with the mouse, 
when you can simply type in the solution to your problem?