How to use a GUI as little as possible on your Linux system.

Viewing Things

less and more are your best friends. less -S disables line wrapping, which may be helpful for reading log files.

Sending Mail

You can send mail on the command line using mail or mutt.

A quick introduction.

Laptop Battery Status

Until we get better batteries, a laptop user always needs to know how much power is left. This can be annoying on the command line, since you lose the task bar battery meter present in most desktop environments. However, you can install the acpi package, and run acpi (or acpi -V for more detail) to get information on your laptop’s battery life.

Learning which OS version you are on

lbs_release -a is helpful when you need to tell somebody which version of Ubuntu (other distros may have it too) you are running but can’t remember yourself.

Booting Into a Text Only System

Once you have mastered the art of the command line, why should you use a desktop environment at all? If you want to ditch GUIs entirely, its fairly easy:

• sudo vim /etc/default/grub
• Find the line this line:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

  And make it like this:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash text"

• Quit vim and run sudo update-grub to update grub.
• When you reboot, the system will boot into a console. Type startx to start your graphical environment, if you ever need it.

I don’t actually use this on any of my computers, since I typically prefer to have a standard desktop environment (usually KDE) and just open a terminal window to do most things. That way I can still run GUI software easily. However, running in text-only mode may be useful when running Linux on really old systems that can’t run a modern desktop, or when using low-spec devices such as the Raspberry Pi.