Keep using syscons -- how?

[Lars Eighner]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2014, Polytropon wrote:

> On Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:25:12 -0500 (CDT), Lars Eighner wrote:
>> What do I have to do or not do to keep being able to use syscons in VGA
>> mode? Is there any way to keep the ability to switch between xwindows and
>> syscons (in VGA i.e. text mode)?
>
> Allow me a more general question. I'm not asking as
> a "means of insult", but because I'm really interested
> in the answer:
>
> Why not use terminal emulators (xterm, rxvt, konsole,
> gnome-terminal etc.) inside an X session?

Because raster fonts are illegible compared to vga fonts, it is insanely
difficult to edit the xwindows keyboard compared to editing keymaps in
syscons, keeping 11 *terms open fullscreen is very problematic compared with
switching vttys, *terms tend to let unicode in instead of maintaining 
strict iso character sets, you end up with extra cursors on the screen and
with other horrible effects of mousen.

Now granted, you can do thing such as making a 4x3 desktop with fvwm or
possibly a similar windows manager, you can drive yourself crazy trying to
edit the xwindows keymap so it sort of partially works with everything. And
you are still in point-and-grunt land, burning resources to make things
pretty for dummies. You cannot kill xwindows and still have a usable
machine. You have to wait for all the pretty pretties to fire up just to
check your email. And then you still have to fire up an *term to get a
command line.

And of course, xwindows has not really worked since the HAL disaster of a
a few years back. If you are in Gnome or KDE, abandon all hope. If you can
get Firefox and GIMP to sort of work in some window manager you have got all
the good out of xwindows that can be got. Just about everything else is so
brittle that it breaks if you look at it, and often even if you don't. Try
charting the dependencies: it looks like a spider operating a Spir-o-graph
with each leg. The comes from the nonsense of OO. Scan ports UPDATING. Look
for the entries for text mode apps. IF you find one, you are unlikely to be
instructed to rebuild 50 requisites and 50 dependencies. And it will seldom
turn out that a dozen of the requistes are broken.

Text mode is robust.  That is really the bottom line.



> I have been using "real" text mode (as well as switching
> between a running X session and virtual terminals) for
> a very long time, and I was totally comfortable with
> the 80x25 screen. Today I find myself using terminal
> emulators in X, scattered across several virtual desktops,
> and only seeing the text mode console when the system
> is booting. I usually don't leave X anymore. The only
> exception is when I have to do system recovery operations
> inside a limited environment (single-user mode, or also
> multi-user mode with specific mount options and no X
> running)...
>
> What are reasons (here: your reasons) for switching to
> text mode from an X session and using the "real" text
> mode console?

I generally want to do everything in a vtty except edit graphics and go to
web sites where I want to see something or when the site is deliberately
hostile to text browers (cough, Facebook).

I want to write, read, use databases, and browse the web in text mode. For
example, if I want to Google something, I want to switch to a vtty to use
lynx and avoid the garbage. I want to edit text files in a vtty where the
otherwise invisible unicode markers will standout in order to cut them down.
And of course, I want to switch to the system console to see what if
anything might be going on.


>> The command line is already useless in every Linux distribution I can find.
>
> Some Linux distributions (usually "the more professional
> ones") allow easy access to the command line within X,
> as described above, but in case X isn't running, the
> text mode consoles are still accessible, even though
> their "enhanced" screen modes (bigger than 80x25) can
> cause trouble on some displays which don't display the
> screen content properly, or don't display it at all.
> The tiny size of the default fonts may also be a problem
> on small screens. Yes, I know, _everyone_ has a supermega
> and ulta HD wide 23" plasma screen these days. :-)


One's I have tried tend to put the text terminals in something absurd like
133x40. And edit the keymap? Forget it!

>
>
>
>> Is that the way BSDs are all going?
>
> I hope not!
>
>
>
>

-- 
Lars Eighner
http://www.larseighner.com/index.html
8800 N IH35 APT 1191 AUSTIN TX 78753-5266