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- <!DOCTYPE html><head><meta charset="utf-8" /><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no" /><meta name="keywords" content="GNU, Emacs, Libre Software, Hurd, Guile, Guix" /><meta name="description" content="GNUcode.me is a website focusing on libre software projects, especially the GNU project." /><link type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate" title="GNUcode.me -- Feed" href="/feed.xml" /><a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@thegnuguy"></a><link type="text/css" href="css/footer.min.css" rel="stylesheet"></link><link type="text/css" href="css/header.min.css" rel="stylesheet"></link><link type="text/css" href="css/main.min.css" rel="stylesheet"></link><title>Console only computing — GNUcode.me</title></head><body><header><nav><ul><li><a href="index.html">GNUcode.me</a></li><li><a href="services.html">Services</a></li><li><a href="about.html">About</a></li><li><a href="business-ideas.html">Business-ideas</a></li></ul></nav></header><h1>Console only computing</h1><main><section class="basic-section-padding"><article><h3>by Joshua Branson — February 12, 2022</h3><div><p>For about two weeks now, I have been using Guix System in console mode only.
- That means that my laptop currently <em>cannot</em> display images or video. It also
- means that I do not have much use for a mouse. It has been an interesting
- experience.</p><p>Of course, the average reader of this blog must be asking, “Why?”. Well you are
- familiar with dumb and smart phones, yes? Have you ever heard of a <strong>life
- computer</strong>? A life computer, is a computer that is so useless, that you want to
- stop using it and live your life instead. I personally have been using my laptop
- to consume tons of entertainment tv shows, movies, etc. I am starting to feel
- like that this is just wasting my life. Some of my good friends do not have time
- for useless entertainment-seeking. Since I want to emulate the best of my
- friends, I would like to make it nearly impossible for me to consume mindless
- entertainment.</p><p>Emacs has been an absolute Godsend for this little experiment. Since, I am
- somewhat familiar with Emacs, I am still able to check email (though I still
- struggle with reading email with Emacs), write these blog posts, use dired, etc.
- I am not certain that I could live in a console only operating system without
- Emacs. Also Emacs’s org-mode is wonderful!</p><p>I also found out that <code>Alt-<left arrow key></code> and <code>Alt-<right arrow key></code> is a
- quick way to cycle through virtual consoles. I am having some issues with being
- unable to use numerous websites. This is pretty obvious, because most console
- web browsers have little to no support for javascript.</p><p>I am currently wanting to listen to some <a href="https://librevox.org">librevox</a> recordings, but I am not
- certain how to navigate the website in console mode. Lynx spits out some errors
- that the HTML is badly formatted or something. For now, I am just using the work
- computers to download said files. I wonder if there is some sort of free
- software tool that will let you search and download audio files from the command
- line…I am sure it exists somewhere. <code>youtube-dl</code> would probably be it, but I
- feel awkward downloading files from youtube, because I am not certain which
- videos are legal for me to download.</p><p>I am planning on continuing to run a console only OS for the forseeable future.
- Since I do not feel like I have the power to NOT use my computer to watch lots
- of tv shows/movies, I gave my friend the root password to my computer, and I
- removed my user ’joshua’ from the <code>wheel</code> group:</p><pre><code>(users (cons* (user-account
- (name "joshua")
- (comment "Joshua Branson")
- (group "users")
- (home-directory "/home/joshua")
- (supplementary-groups
- '("audio" "kvm" "netdev"
- )))
- %base-user-accounts))</code></pre><p>I also set up my computer to use a modified <code>bare-bones.scm</code>, which means that I am
- using ’%base-services’ instead of ’%desktop-services’. I kind of wonder how
- lean I could make a custom Linux kernel since I am restricting myself to console
- computing only.</p><p>I am finding that I would prefer to run some commands as root, like halt,
- reboot, and adding in a new wifi network connection. It has actually been a
- pleasure to read through <code>man 5 sudoers</code>, which is the file on your computer
- that determines who can run which commands. I have not quite figured out how to
- set up my user <code>joshua</code> to be able do various tasks like halt, reboot, kill,
- etc., but I am looking forward to figuring it out. It will probably look like
- something below. Note that I have NOT tested this bit of code.</p><pre><code>;; I can read 'man 5 suoders' for tips about the syntax of suoders file.
- ;; the very end of the file has some examples.
- (sudoers-file
- (plain-file "sudoers"
- (string-append (plain-file-content %sudoers-specification)
- "CMD_Alias KILL = /run/current-system/profile/bin/kill
- CMD_Alias SHUTDOWN = /run/current-system/profile/bin/shutdown
- CMD_Alias HALT = /run/current-system/profile/bin/halt
- CMD_Alias REBOOT = /run/current-system/profile/bin/reboot
- CMD_Alias HERD = /run/current-system/profile/bin/HERD
- CMD_Alias NMCLI = /run/current-system/profile/bin/nmcli
- joshua ALL = KILL, SHUTDOWN, HALT, REBOOT, HERD, NMCLI, \
- sudoedit /etc/somefile, /etc/another-file"
- )))</code></pre><p>That’s all that I have for today. See you next time.</p></div></article></section></main><footer><p>© 2020 Joshua Branson. The text on this site is free culture under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.</p><p>This website is build with Haunt, a static site generator written in Guile Scheme. Source code is <a href="https://notabug.org/jbranso/gnucode.me">available.</a></p><p>The color theme of this website is based off of the famous <a href="#3f3f3f" target="_blank">zenburn</a> theme.</p></footer></body>
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