[LAU] which lau distro is more commandline friendly?

Joel Roth joelz at pobox.com
Tue Dec 22 14:16:52 UTC 2015


Karen Lewellen wrote:
> Hi all,
> At the same time I am  posting here, I am posting on the talk list of  a LUG
> here in the greater Toronto Area.
> Two situations  that members have asked about, referenced   are bringing up
> a couple of questions for me.
> of the popular   Linux distributions specifically developed for the
> professional audio community,  which is more  likely to allow for command
> line access?

Hi Karen,

Pretty much any distribution is command-line friendly
if you omit the X display manager (xdm, kdm, etc.)

Then when you boot up, you get a text login screen at a virtual terminal.
Maybe you can do all the work you need there.

If you want to use Gnu screen to provide more flexibility
such as a long scrollback buffer and copy/paste between
terminal sessions, it's easy to run in a virtual terminal.

If you need certain GUI apps, you will have to run X, and
find a way to support X over ssh, but I doubt your
speech platform could run ssh as a remote X display.

If you wanted to run X, you would login to a virtual
terminal, type 'startx' and have commands in your home
configuration files .xsession or .xinitrc to start a
terminal emulator and Gnu screen, along with whatever GUI
apps you want to bring up. I can't tell you what to do to
shift focus among GUI apps. It depends on the window manager
you choose.  Most use a mouse.  

I use the i3 tiling window manager and StartKey + Right or
Left arrow to switch among apps. You would need some
customization to read audibly out the name of the
application as you switched through them. Which you would 
want.

But I don't see how running X would work with your current
screen reader. So just avoid installing an X display
manager, and you'll be golden to use any command
line programs your distribution provides. You'll find they
involve much less care and feeding than GUI programs, 
as far as regards system resources, likelihood of crashing,
etc.

Good luck,

Joel

-- 
Joel Roth
  



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