Slackware for the minimal WM/CLI warrior
 

Something I will experimenting with soon will be a custom Slackware installation for desktop usage, for minimal WMs, or framebuffer/CLI-only usage. My plan is to omit all GTK and QT dependencies from the installation, but keep Xorg, the minimal WMs included with Slackware (twm, fvwm, blackbox, fluxbox), all the X apps that don't require GTK or QT, and of course all the wonderful CLI apps.

This thread will be a placeholder for this experiment, and I also encourage and welcome any input/advise/comments other Slackers might have as to this experiment.

As for inspiration, I look to the fine work done at LinuxBBQ with Debian sid (mostly). They have many fine releases with no GTK/QT dependencies, using a variety of lesser-known WMs, and framebuffer/CLI offerings.

I shall be following this thread closely :)

You don't technically have to remove anything from Slackware. Just use OpenBox WM and xterm. A lot of problems can come up from removing packages from Slackware, which is why a full installation is always recommended, and you don't have to use anything you don't need right off hand.

Certainly, but then this wouldn't be the fun experiment that it's intended to be. Sure, I may totally bork it by not installing all the libs and such, but I will be taking a look at all the packages and carefully considering each one, based on my stated goal. For the record, I NEVER do a full installation, I always omit all KDE, and several other packages, and haven't had a broken system yet.

There was a thread a little while ago:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ou-use-872378/

that may interest you. A lot of it relevant to what you're after I think.

Excellent, thanks for this!

I was reminded that the package sets are a good place to start pruning an installation:

http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php

And this looks like a good thing:

http://pbraun.nethence.com/unix/sysu...slackinst.html

For a basic installation that has the base tools (including networking tools) you can see which packages are included in the mini root file systems for the ARM port:
http://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwa..._minirootfs.sh

You'd need to add many more libraries and bits of X to get a working window manager, but it'd be a reasonable base from which to start.

A very fine idea! Did you already come up with a solution for

- setting up network for road warriors (I was surprised that there is nm-applet in slackware, but you need additional software (trayers) for it to work with other window managers and I am still struggling with nmcli)

- power management (don't know about a CLI version or a light X version, so for latter I tried xfce4-power-manager, but its pop-up windows don't work well with windowmaker (pop-ups create new program icons on desktop), and if I already have to use that component from xfce, then I don't see a reason against using the rest of xfce4 either)

- suspend from CLI (well, I came up with my own script using dbus-send)

Here is a very old "Slackware 12.2" minimal system that you could look at to get some ideas. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ckware-704866/

samac

I did a minimal install back in the 12 days and it went fine. just tried with 14.1 and found that there are libraries that PHP needs in the X set and even though I installed those I still had issues. Seems things are more interrelated now.

I know wifi and power management are both doable from cli, but I'm doing this on a desktop machine, so I'm not worrying about those. Using anything from Xfce, including xfce4-power-manager, would require GTK and its libs, which I am avoiding.

Aside from links and lynx browsers, I am using Dillo, which works nicely. Tried netsurf, but it needed gtk stuff.

Here's what I came up with so far:

Hmm, this may be helpful...

I've read this a while back... Specifically:

Now, I've never tried it, but maybe you could check it out, remove Salix packages and start building up from there?

I run dropbox in stalonetray on twm:

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...ch=stalonetray

Continuing to work with fluxbox and pimp it out some. I added xfe for a GUI file manager, as it does not require gtk or qt:

Use CDE and Tk exclusively ;-)

- I could be wrong, but last I checked nmcli cannot create new connections yet. It can connect to existing networks (ie, ones that have been seen and logged by nm) but it cannot, say, add a network connection using the results of iwscan -> wpa_supplicant -> dhcpcd

- `ibam` monitors battery life from the shell, check it out. very useful.

- i'd love to see this suspend script :-)

Have to check nmcli if it really cannot create new connections. Then there's wicd left (creating conflicts with Networkmanager).

As for power management right now I am using acpitool, but neither this one nor ibam can be configured to suspend the system if battery is low or system is idle for a certain amount of time. Guess I need to write some shell script and put it in crontab...

Suspend for slackware 14.1 works with this command

I just put it in a shell script called zzz and my fingers felt much better :-)

So, my latest efforts have been about using cwm as the standard WM for both my Slackware and OpenBSD boxes. I have found it to be my favorite stacker, so far. For tiling WMs, I'm liking euclid-wm and larswm.

To get the best of your CLI, I recommend installing FbTerm, that can make use of good TTF fonts initially intended for X, like DejaVu.

Despite its name it works not only in a framebuffer but also in a Vesa console. You can scale the font at will. It's available @ http://slackbuilds.org. In case you would want not to use the whole X stack, here are the only dependencies from the l and x series:
l/freetype
x/fontconfig
x/dejavu (or an other font if you prefer).

You'll need also a/aaa_elflibs and ap/libx86 but I guess that you have that already installed ;)

If you want to see an example, you could try an installer in http://slint.fr/testing, that make use of it.

^ Thanks, yes, I do/have used fbterm for Slack CLI builds, works great!

How is it going so far? I want to try going "CLI warrior" too, but on OpenBSD.
What browser do you use?

^ Good! My latest install (desktop) was done without DEs or WMs, and also without consolekit and policykit. And then I added cwm. I use Firefox for GUI browsing, and Links for text browsing, although I also have Opera 12.16 installed, so not entirely CLI apps. OpenBSD would be a great base for this, too.

How do you change the gtk theme from command line? (Firefox looked horrible). I tried building lxappearance and it didn't work, tried editing gtkrc file but it didn't work either.

I didn't, I just live with the appearance of any gtk apps.

Ah, but it looks so horrible D:

Just the window interface, or do your fonts look horrible, too? I've noticed that Opera 12.16 looks better than Firefox, for what it's worth.

The interface, I've found the stock OpenBSD font configuration pretty good actually (Firefox). Better looking than most Linux distros imo (talking about stock configs). Didn't try other browsers.

^ Yes, I would agree with you there. I'm not sure why it is, but font rendering in all BSDs I have tried is much better than Linux.

Some websites looks worse but it is more because they use a missing font on the stock config (like ms fonts). The font rendering itself is great, I can get comparable results on Linux only when using something like in finality.