So, now I’ve finished beating my CLI with a stick, I’d like to take a moment to explain a little more about me and my setup. This will mostly be slightly technical, so if you just want to watch me crash and burn, you’ll have to wait for it to happen. :p

Firstly, a bit about me. My name is Peter Hicks, I’m 18 years old, and I’m an English sixth form student. Thankfully, my last deadline was yesterday, so I’ve got a bit of time to experiment before I have to try and write any essays in nano (shush, vi fans)!

I’m not really diving in cold turkey - I spent yesterday as a “trial run”, firstly to see if it was feasible to do this for me (yes) and allowing myself use of a GUI to get it set up. Which I ended up using a few times, just for simplicity’s sake.

Firstly, I installed a base server install of Ubuntu 10.10 and installed X. Yes, I know it’s cheating slightly to have a window-manager, but I don’t have any GUI programs /installed/ now I’ve started, let alone running, so I i think I’m okay!

I then installed ratpoison - as I decided going strictly TTY-only would be a bit of a waste of my 20” monitor - and it seemed like it was the best suited to running without a mouse. Started it up, fiddled with the controls, beat xterm with a massive pointy stick (I don’t much like the default black on white, so it had to be changed!). I then proceeded to ssh into my server - also running Ubuntu 10.10 server without a GUI, and has been for many months - and fiddle with text-based browsers (eventually settling on w3m, as it played the most nicely), and poking mplayer - the one major exception I’m allowing myself is mplayer, as although it’s a CLI program, it technically displays graphics. But I don’t want to miss out on my favourite shows, so it’s staying. I’m sure I can be forgiven.

My laptop has been set up with a very similar configuration, so not much to say there.

And now I’ve just been bombing around on the internet, listening to music via mplayer (I’ll sort out a frontend to MPD eventually!!), and generally wondering why my CD of lossless bass tutorials wouldn’t mount. Brute force and pig ignorance solved that one eventually.

Oh, and if you ever want to ask me anything or know of a better program for any purpose that I could use, feel free to comment here (I’ll try and keep an eye on it) or contact me on Twitter, at @database404. I’m more likely to check Twitter.