Howdy, Yes, thanks. It is really interesting to see a setup that is similar in functionality, but completely different in execution from my own. For your script, I wonder if you couldn't make it more portable by replacing janina with $USER? Storm On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 12:01:53PM -0400, Al Sten-Clanton wrote:
Janina, thank you very much for this wealth of information!I agree with you about the quality of Arch's documentation. Debian's is the only rival I know of, though of course there could be others.Al On 09/10/2016 10:44 AM, Janina Sajka wrote:Hi, Storm, Fernando, All: This has become a very long post. Be warned! <grin> I don't mind writing it, and will gladly respond to more questions, because I believe it's my obligation to share what I know and how I do things when people ask about that. I'm only paying forward what others have done for me over the years, after all. I've sectioned this email to hopefully help organize the topics covered. * My console launch script The script is so dirt simple, I feel confident pasting it in line here. Following the script, some comments in response to questions ... <begin.script> #!/bin/bash for i in `seq 2 24`; do openvt -f -c $i -u janina done <end.script> First, some comments on using this script, before I go to answering Storm's very good question ... The script assumes a couple things: * You're going to login on tty1 as your ordinary user. So, tty1 is * already open, probably with Speakup and/or Brltty. * You've added your ordinary user to visudo, probably with the * setting that doesn't require a password for sudo, though it'd be * OK with password as well. I just don't see the point in my home * office of constantly prompting for passwords. It's different on * my notebook on the road, where I use vlock -a as root when I * step away from my machine. * You've gone in and deleted any extra gettys under * /etc/./systemd/system/getty.target.wants because you really only * need the one for tty1. The above script handles the rest. I * believe this is the Arch default, but may be different on other * Linux distros. For another way of getting this result, look at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Automatic_login_to_virtual_console Note that you may not need all 24, as Storm suggests. In fact I only use 12 in my Mac Airbook where I run Arch linux as a guest vm under VMware. The reason I'm OK with only 12 on the Airbook is two fold. I don't do as much, so can get away with fewer consoles, plus I find it hard enough controlling the vm vs the Mac with mapped keys on a Mac laptop. PS: By the way, I also autologin all my consoles on the vm. I figure the Mac login at boot is sufficient to cover the guests, too. If you're interested in how to do that, look at: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/42359/how-can-i-autologin-to-desktop-with-systemd PPS: I'm likely to be selling my Airbook soon. I'm glad I put in the time to learn how that environment works, but it's just not for me. I'd keep it if running Linux in a vm on the Airbook was easier and more reliable, but it just isn't, in my experience. The Airbook is incredibly cool hardware, but I'm just not comfortable in the Apple ecosystem. It's just not me, nor my style. * Using screen Storm has asked that I expressly answer why all the many consoles, why not just use screen? It's a great question. In truth, I do use screen. I use it extensively as I'll shortly describe. There are many outstanding reasons for using screen, it's one of the coolest apps available on the console, and I strongly recommend learning it. Here's just one "aw shucks" example. Late next week I'm getting on a plane and traveling across the pond to attend a week long conference. After checking into my hotel and pluggin in my laptop, I'll first figure out how to get on line, preferably over a wired connection. Then, I'll ssh into my data-center hosted server and resume several activities right were I left off before leaving home. How's that possible? By resuming an existing screen session. This is so important to me that I always launch screen in a way that allows me to give my screen session a human meaningful name: Example: I launch 10 mutt sessions using a particular .screenrc file set up specifically to do that, with the command: exec screen -U -S mutt_sessions -c /home/janina/.screenrc.mutt So, when I traverse the planet and login from afar, I can resume all those same sessions with a simple: screen -A -x mutt_sessions If I ever am unsure whether I've opened a particular screen session that I routinely use and would likely have opened at some point, maybe because I've recently rebooted my server, screen will happily tell me what's open with the command: screen -ls Why 10 mutt sessions, you ask? Well, I have different folders that I frequently access in those 10 sessions. So, if I want to catch up on all my Linux lists, including this Orca list and the Speakup list, I forst go to console 10 with Alt+F10 (or Ctrl+Alt+F10 if I'm coming from the graphical environment). If my computer folder was the last one I looked at in tty10, it's what will be in front of me. But, if my last folder was my outbox, I then simply do Alt+A followed by the digit 4 from the top row of the qwerty to get to the computer folder. As you may now have guessed, I have particular folders on Alt+a from 1 through 9 plus 0. The special mutt .screenrc file noted above automagically sets all that up. In fact when the openvt script above opens all those consoles, it also tests for what tty it is, and whether there's already a screen on that console. A long series of if then statements will then launch screen in that tty with particular settings that I routinely need and use. I find this approach awesome because it's fully predictable and reliable. No hunting around for a lost window with Alt+TAB. Here's my personal scema of ttys. I provide this simply to explain why and how I actually do use 24 of them: tty1 The first login, and the eventually home of the graphical desktop with Orca. I've been using startx, but am going to investigate the systemctl isolate command I uncovered yesterday on this very thread. tty2 10 screen sessions including 5 instances of lynx, and an ssh to my server on Ctrl+a 4 in order to access my irssi session with Talking Arch. This is my "learn more about technology" console. It's home directory, is ~/hwdev tty3 Personal stuff like paratransit reservations, baseball standings (Go Nats!), recipies, etc., etc. Every kind of personal stuff except money. tty4 Similar to tty2 and tty3, but having to do with music. This default home folder is ~/music. tty5 Ten screen consoles for my church activities. I'm the Music Director in a church, so this one gets lots of activity regularly. tty6 A root console. It's the exception to the openvt above. I always login directly on this one as root because some commands won't allow a sudo -i to work, believe it or not. They want an actual root login, not a sudo. tty7 My standards work, mostly W3C these days. As with tty2 above, it includes an ssh into the data center server to access irssi to my various W3C channels on Ctrl+a 4. tty8 Another root, this time via sudo -i tty9 A personal console with all my financial stuff. tty10 My mutt as explained above. tty11 Linphonec for phone calls. tty12 Ten screen sessions around travel activity tty13-16 Each is an ssh session to another machine, e.g. tty13 is an ssh to my server, where I'm also running screen with 10 sessions. tty17-20 More consoles about music work, usually without a screen session. tty21-24 Odds and ends, usually without a screen session, but might have one in particular circumstances. *A word about graphical desktops and how I use them I suspect most Orca people do a lot more with Orca than I do. I have not played with mate, nor with any of the other desktop managers already mentioned in this thread. That's because I'm basically happy launching apps from Alt+F2. Mostly, I use Firefox, and even that I launch from a script in /usr/local/bin because my first step is to login my LastPass credentials. I also use LibreOffice, but not really all that much. If I ever seriously need a spread sheet, though, this will certainly change. I also use gedit, especially when I want to copy content from some web page, because I've not found a convenient way to copy from the gui to a vim instance in a console. Now that Joanie has sped up Thunderbird, I'll probably give it another spin. But, I'm not very likely to abandon using mutt with Speakup anytime soon, even if Thunderbird gets a permanent spot in my gui use, just like I haven't abandoned Lynx in the console, despite all the time I spend using Firefox. I should give a plug to the xclip app. I use it alot, especially for copying URLs between the desktop and the console. So, the bottom line here is that I'm not actually using the gui as an integrated environment. Point and click just isn't my metaphor for effective computer use. Nor is Alt+TAB my metaphor for finding some particular task I was working on. I smile when my colleagues on teleconferences say, as they frequently do, "Wait a second, I lost that window ..." I rarely lose my "windows," because they're anchored on specific tty's. So, trying out mate, or rat, or whatever, is on my curiosity list. I may get to playing around with one of those, one of these days. It just hasn't been my personal or business priority yet. NOTE: There are all kinds of refinements for starting the gui using one, or one of several desktop managers. I find the following doc helpful: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Start_X_at_login * One additional comment It's really, really important to learn how to search for, and how to find on line documentation. I'm still learning, some 20 years after first starting to use Unix/Linux. And, it's important to ask questions on lists like this one, especially after you've tried to find answers via on line docs. Just this week a long time colleague on the Speakup list pointed me to some awesome ALSA documentation that I had completely missed, even though I had searched long and hard. Last, I want to put in a plug for Arch documentation. The quality of Arch documentation was the first thing that attracted me away from Fedora and to Arch. I used Arch docs for years as a Fedora user before I actually switched to Arch on my local machines. My data-center based server, opera.rednote.net, still runs Fedora, but increasingly I'm solving problems by looking at Arch documentation. Hope this long post is helpful! Janina Storm Dragon writes:Howdy, I am in fact blind. So much so that my computer doesn't currently have a screen hooked up to it. I chose ratpoison because it is extremely light weight, and thanks to a bit of scripting, it is very accessible. But now, I have a couple questions for Janina. First, can you send me that script too? I'm just curious how it works/want to learn from it. Second, have you ever heard of screen, and if so why not use it? You don't need 24 consoles open when you can have unlimited applications running in 1 console, plus a second one for X. This is another reason why I chose ratpoison, it's a very screen-like interface, so it makes X seem more like an extention of the console. Thanks Storm On Fri, Sep 09, 2016 at 09:34:15PM -0300, Fernando Botelho wrote:Dear Janina, it is great to hear from you. Thank you very much for your software setup description. I would indeed love to try the script you are using. Please let me know how I may obtain it. Our experimental computer uses ARCH, if that makes any difference. Another detailed email sent earlier by Storm, kindly suggested a software called RatPoison. However, you seem to be achieving the same result with standard OS tools. Is the difference that RatPoison offers a visually more appealing configuration or is it something else? I automatically assumed that Storm was blind, but maybe he has low vision, or maybe there is another aspect of using RatPoison that may have attracted him to that solution. Any ideas? Thanks again, Fernando On 09/09/2016 06:00 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:Hi, Fernando: The short answer is "yes." The somewhat longer answer ... You can have both environments active at the same time and simply switch among them whenever you want to do that. You use CTRL+Alt plus one of the function keys to switch around your various consoles. Note that, on most distros by default, and certainly by design if you need to tweak things, it's easy to have up to 24 consoles open at any time, because the Ctrl+Alt to the left of the spacebar is treated differently from the Ctrl+Alt to the right of the spacebar. My setup is in fact that elaborate. And, yes, I really do use all 24 consoles. Actually, I personally use them in a fairly rigorous way, e.g. my graphical desktop with Orca is always on Ctrl+Alt+F1, where as my mutt email client is always on Ctrl+Alt+F10. Special Note: You can dispense with the Ctrl key when switching among text consoles. You need it only when exiting from the graphical desktop. The classic Linux/Unix installation gives you 6 consoles. For my purposes I've actually reduced this to one by default on boot. Then, I use a script that calls the command openvt in a for loop to open consoles 2 through 24 for me. I do it this way because it's actually tedious to have to log in to each console by hand. I'd rather login once, and let the script open my remaining consoles for me. Let me know if you'd like this script. PS: To get the text console as the default login you need to observe how your distribution does that. If your distribution uses systemd, you would, as root, do: systemctl set-default multi-user.target With the above executed successfully, the next time you boot, you'll come to a text login screen on tty1. Then, to launch the graphical environment, you could do: startx Or you might do: systemctl isolate graphical.target hth Janina Fernando Botelho writes:Hi everyone, I am trying to help someone with very unusual requirements and the following has come up: On the F123 distro, and just about every other one I have seen, one boots into the graphical user interface and uses the Terminal on occasion. My question is: is it just as easy and practical for someone to boot into the command line, use it with SpeakUp most of the time, and then open Gnome or Mate and use it with Orca for specific tasks? Would switching back and forth be as smooth as it is to jump into the Terminal from Gnome? Thanks, Fernando _______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/ GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/ GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org-- Powered by Arch Linux! I am registered Linux user number 508465: https://linuxcounter.net/user/508465.html My blog, Thoughts of a Dragon: http://www.stormdragon.tk/ get my public PGP key: gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 43DDC193 Twitter and Facebook are so ... yesteryear. Get your 2MB Social account TODAY! http://2mb.social/main/register The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones. "Mighty Elric, Mightier Sword. Sorcerer and Swordsman, slayer of kin, Lord of a dying race. King of ruin, dragon master, Champion of Doom." Domine - Chronicles of the Black Sword_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/ GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org_______________________________________________ orca-list mailing list orca-list gnome org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/ GNOME Universal Access guide: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org
-- Powered by Arch Linux! I am registered Linux user number 508465: https://linuxcounter.net/user/508465.html My blog, Thoughts of a Dragon: http://www.stormdragon.tk/ get my public PGP key: gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 43DDC193 Twitter and Facebook are so ... yesteryear. Get your 2MB Social account TODAY! http://2mb.social/main/register How to load Windows on your machine in 2 minutes or less: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbf9tOGwno Well I asked my old pappy why he called his brew White lightnin' stead of mountain dew, I took a little sip and right away I knew. And my eyes bugged out and my face turned blue, lightnin' started flashin' thunder started crashin, (whew white lightnin). George Jones
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