I have an old laptop that works great, but is not really meant for the gui. it runs debian just fine. I am looking for recommendations for software to use that is command line only. I have used ssh to access servers and foobarred machines so it will not be totally unfamiliar with it. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

That's a very vague qn. Tell us what you want to achieve, we'll suggest options...
Which version of debian?

Erm why not use a more lightweight window manager such as xfce? That works on almost any computer

If you really want just the command line, there was somebody once who tried as an experiment to do everything from there, and put up a nice list of usefull programs... but I can't seem to find it, will post back if I do.

All I remembered was links or elinks as a CLI web browser.

Didn't laptops appear on the market after the GUI was in common use?

The point is that I think laptops--in general--are intended to run a GUI system. To be sure, "old" often means "slow".

i looking for th usual programs such as word processing. spreadsheet, and database. I want to be able to do everthing on a minimal drive. I want to be able to travel with a laptop where I do not have to worry if something happens to it. i.e. being looked at while at customs or the like, I am running a p1 166 with 96 megs memory (less video ram). running pre-lenny with icewm and fluxbox. When I installed and early version of lenny I could not get X11 to work, so I put pre-lenny back on it. I may need to try it again.

You can run X on this hardware without much problems. Something like DSL should run whithout any major problem, with icewm, fluxbox or something similar.

If you have something in mind (i.e., the msworks suite for DOS) let us know, because in such case you might want to run something like FreeDOS instead

I know no word processor for command line (wordperfect for dos works ok in dosbox, though). In the unix world the standard would be to use plain text files formated with TeX. I know not much about spreadsheets, and as far as I know there's no clone of msaccess for text mode if that's what you mean.

If you really want a GUI-less environment, just don't install or start the X server. If your computer has an issue running the fatter desktops you can try out Xfce, awsome, fluxbox.. so on and so forth. A true "minimal Debian install" (ie uncheck the box that says desktop when installing) has just the terminal.

Take a look at these:
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/02...an-it-all-fit/
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/05...ure-reference/

Actually, just read the whole blog. Amazing stuff.

Thanx, I will certainly look at vwm. I have used freedos, but it does not have the power of linux. besides I want to run everthing native. Someone told me about sc or oleo for the spreadsheet. sqllite or mysql for the database with php5/php-cli for the frontend, and probably stay with vim as the word processor. antiword was suggested as an addon tool. I might look at emacs. I might even consider the freebasic compiler to write code to handle data since I have a decent knowledge of basic. sed and awk are other tools also something to learn.hnb was recommended as a good note-taker program. then there was ledger to do accounting looks like it is based on gnucash.

Thanx for all the help.