Jeepsters Lair
Jeepsters Lair

This is a listing of my own personal preferences regarding CLI (Command Line Interface) and FB (Framebuffer) tools. I offer no advice on setting these up. However, for an Xless box or a box without much horsepower or even for using your box for pure speed reasons these will aid you in making a nice GUIless box into something useful.

Most of the programs below work in a plain console, others are intended for use with a framebuffer enabled kernel. I`ll quickly show you how to activate framebuffer modes in your kernel. This applies to 2.4.x kernels only

cd to wherever your kernel sources are (for the purposes of this short tutorial I will use menuconfig)
Load up menuconfig and enter the Console drivers section

The following options must be activated: 
	[*] VGA text console
	[*] Video mode selection support
	Frame-buffer support  --->
	[*] Support for frame buffer devices
Extended options follow. You should choose your card if one is available, however not all cards have thier own driver, here, it is upto you to figure out which driver to use or not. This example below works with my GeForce 3 Ti200
	[*]   VESA VGA graphics console
	[*] Advanced low level driver options
	[.....]
	<*>     8 bpp packed pixels support
	<*>     16 bpp packed pixels support
	<*>     24 bpp packed pixels support
	<*>     32 bpp packed pixels support
	[.....]
	[*]   Select compiled-in font
	[*]     VGA 8x8 font
	[*]     VGA 8x16 font

Now you should build your kernel and install it

One final step is required and that is lilo.conf (grub users can find a config here)
Load up /etc/lilo.conf you may see a line like this

vga = normal

Here "normal" is no value, below are a list of values you can add to the vga line

NOTE: you should change the vga = (number) line to one value as specified below, IE vga = 791

# Normal VGA console
vga = normal
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x64k
# vga=791
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x32k
# vga=790
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x256
# vga=773
# VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x64k
# vga=788
# VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x32k
# vga=787
# VESA framebuffer console @ 800x600x256
# vga=771
# VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x64k
# vga=785
# VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x32k
# vga=784
# VESA framebuffer console @ 640x480x256
# vga=769
Save your lilo.conf and issue "lilo" at your prompt to install it with the new values

On reboot you should see an image of our good friend Tux (or two if you have a dual processor machine) in the top right corner of your display

The program listing follows, have fun

Catagory Name Url Comment
WWW links2 http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~clock/twibright/links/ Graphical WWW browser -- links -g -driver fb (for framebuffer mode) or links -g (for svgalib mode)
WWW elinks http://elinks.or.cz ELinks can render both frames and tables, is highly customizable and can be extended via Lua scripts
Mail Retrieval fetchmail http://catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/ Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections)
Email pine http://www.washington.edu/pine/ Pine - a Program for Internet News and Email - is a tool for reading, sending, and managing electronic messages
Email mutt http://www.mutt.org/ Mutt is a small but very powerful text-based mail client for Unix operating systems
Usenet slrn http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ slrn (``s-lang read news'') is a newsreader, i.e. a program that accesses a newsserver to read messages from the Internet News service (also known as ``Usenet'')
FTP ncftp http://www.ncftp.com/ The purpose of ncftp is to provide a powerful and flexible interface to the Internet standard File Transfer Protocol. It is intended to replace the stock ftp program that comes with the system
IRC irssi http://irssi.org/ Irssi is a modular IRC client for UNIX
Instant Messenger centericq http://thekonst.net/centericq/ Centericq is a text mode menu- and window-driven IM interface that supports the ICQ2000, Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, IRC and Jabber protocols.
Instant Messenger Pebrot http://pebrot.sourceforge.net/ Pebrot is a text MSN messenger client implemented with Python. It has also a pretty and colorful Curses-based interface.
Image Viewer fbi http://bytesex.org/fbi.html Framebuffer Picture Viewer
Screen Grabber fbdump http://www.rcdrummond.net/fbdump/index.html FrameBuffer Screen Shooter - I have a small script that makes fbdump useful/easier, you can grab it here
Screen Grabber fbgrab http://w1.827.telia.com/~u82705821/fbgrab/ FrameBuffer Screen Shooter
MP3 Player mpg123 http://www.mpg123.de/ It plays mp3 ;-)
MP3 Player mpg321 http://mpg321.sourceforge.net/ It plays mp3 ;-)
MP3 Frontend mp3blaster http://www.stack.nl/[...]/src Mp3blaster is an mp3 player. Its interface is entirely text based, thereby eliminating the need for a graphical environment like X-Windows
MP3 Frontent cplay http://www.tf.hut.fi/~flu/cplay/ cplay - a curses front-end for various audio players. Simple, yet very very usable
CD Player workbone ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/sound/cdrom/curses/ Console CD Player
Console Mixer rexima http://rus.members.beeb.net/rexima.html rexima is a curses-based interactive mixer which can also be used from the command-line
CD making/writing cdrtools http://www.fokus.gmd.de[...]cdrecord.html This contains the basic tools one requires to make and burn a CD
Frontend for CD/RW cdw http://cdw.sourceforge.net/ Console/dialog frontend for CD/RW creation and burning (requires cdrtools)
Audio CD Creation audio_burn http://www.thecodefactory.org/audio_burn/ audio_burn is a command-line audio cd burning application written in C
DVD writing ProDVD ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/ProDVD/ Read the README there, grab the cdrecord-wrapper.sh script and the binary you need
Movie Playing MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ mplayer -vo fbdev -vm -fbmode "800x600-75" should get you up and running
Windowing Enviroment twin http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/ Console windows, be aware framebuffer applications dont play nice with twin
File Manager mc http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/ Simply the best