Command Line able to use GUI apps?
 

hey all, first post here

I (after much ado) was able to install Debian on my brandspankingnew

Compaq Armada 4120
120mhz
48mb ram
2.1 gig HD

:D

and now im wondering what to do, I obviously dont have enough ram etc to run a halfway decent GUI, and im picking up the command line lingo pretty ok, so now im wondering if its possible to run things like openoffice or kdeoffice or anything from the command line, because i only need word processing, and no vi will NOT suffice :D

any ideas?

-:newbie: :newbie:

no that's not possible. but you *should* be able to scrape through using something like abiword (which is just as good as koffice but uses less integration with any desktop so will use less resources) koffice might be ok too... what you need though is to try running a *VERY* lightweight window manager like blackbox, or even light, fvwm, twm, mwm...

I *think* that you will also be able to run an X server on less resources by deliberately using a basic generic xserver like the fbdev driver, which simple runs X inside a framebuffer on your graphics card, so it's pretty fast and light, but doesn't do anything fancy, which you obviously don't want anyway.

it is actually possible to run gtk based programs in a framebuffer (i.e. without X altogether) but they need to be specifically written with that aim in mind, so abiword (which is gtk based) is extremley unliekly to work like that.

Interesting ... tell me acid_kewpie where can i find out more about writting software like that, what's the buzz words i might want to google for?

ta mate :)

Theres plenty of programs for Console word processing. If you're just doing basic stuff, you could even get by without X. Search Freshmeat.