GUI

[Taavi Burns]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 03:24:19PM -0500, Terrence Enger wrote:
> Meanwhile, the combination of middle-aged eyes, a small
> elderly monitor, and a dislike of fumbling for the mouse all
> suggest that I will be using the command line for quite a
> while.

With proper settings in X, you should be able to take advantage
of the added flexibility of graphics and a configurable window 
manager and still be able to read the text on the screen.
Konsole has a number of settings which might be helpful.  Try
using a custom font (Andale Mono with antialiasing enabled looks
VERY nice on my LCD; not sure if it'll be an improvement on an
old, fuzzy CRT).  You can also set Konsole to be full-screen,
and disable all of the decorations, effectively leaving you
with "just" a console, but while running X.

You can access all of the settings through the menus, which are
always accessible by right-clicking inside the Konsole.

> That brings up another thought, though.  Since my first
> question on Thursday, I read something somewhere suggesting
> that I can run a GUI and still have access to the text
> consoles via F1, F2, et cetera.  I do not seem to be able to

Absolutley.  CTRL-ALT-F1 should take you to VTY0, F2 for VTY1,
etc.  X often lives somewhere around CTRL-ALT-F7, F9, or something
like that (all depends on the distro, see /etc/inittab.  There
should be a section that reads like:
# TERMINALS
c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux
c2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty2 linux
c3:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty3 linux
c4:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty4 linux
c5:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty5 linux
c6:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty6 linux

X will pick the next unused one (i.e. c7, i.e. CTRL-ALT-F7) in
my case.  And yes, this means that you can run X more than once
at the same time, and switch between different X sessions.  :)

Have fun!

-- 
taa
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