screen-vs is what I’ve come to call screen with the vertical split patch applied, for no real reason other than that’s what the PKGBUILD is called in AUR, and I adopted the name when I drafted my own port for Crux. screen with that patch is more fun than a bag of cats, and the things you can do with it along with a little framebuffer love are amazing.
Here’s an example, a sidebar screenshot from a day or two ago you might remember. …
If you are uninitiated, that’s mocp running across the top of the screen, with mc down the side on the left, and htop and iftop on the right. That’s more or less a normal screen setup these days, when I am not demanding that the Thinkpad do something unusual.
As an example of “unusual,” when I scrape Jamendo for worthwhile jazz albums, I usually split the screen like this.
The benefit in that is having mc at the top as a file manager, so I can unzip and dump files into the folders I choose, or jettison them altogether if they suck. On the top right is iftop, watching my bandwidth and so forth, while the bulk of the screen is dedicated to elinks, which is rather like an expectorant for the Internet. Clears out the gunk, and leaves you with the important parts.
But best of all, for the naysayers in the crowd, the ones who will cling desperately to X because it’s somehow the “only” answer to proper image display. …
That, friends, is mplayer on the top left, running a DVD rip while alsamixer is available on the right. At the bottom, iftop on the right (I was transferring a file between machines when I snapped that image) and at left, of course, htop watching the system profile.
And what a system profile it is. A 550MHz machine maxed out at 192Mb of PC100, a machine that was a thrift-shop special a year and a half ago, a machine that most people would probably give away rather than have to look at another day, a machine with only 4MB of video memory and an 800×600 screen … and it’s doing all that on about 5 percent of its processor power and around 31MB of memory.
That’s the best endorsement I can offer for handing X its pink slip. Who needs all of the trappings and dead weight that come with X — let alone a full honking desktop environment like Ubuntu’s Gnome — when you can get all these things for almost nothing?
Trust me. Start over from scratch. Tear out all the crud and take a look at how you can do all the same things with far less baggage. You’ll thank me later. … 
Can we have one of your “Like a Pro” for screen. I am running Xubuntu 9.04 (cli install) so vertical split should be there by default. I have a handle on dvtm but can’t see how screen can add to my cli happiness? Do you have some suggestions for .screenrc?
Great blog, it’s my daily fix
Oh, have you had a play with directvnc? I have a headless Windows virtual machine for a few non linux things, and directvnc provides graphical vnc access to it. Just need to match the resolution of your “guest” to your “host”. Great
Hell, yeah. I was actually inspired by your blog and had been using my Arch install without X server running.
But pressing complaints from my brother and his complaints on being GNU/Linux too uncool and the release of Jaunty prompted me to install Ubuntu again.
I started my life through PCLinux -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Slackware -> Arch and back again, now to Ubuntu.
Thanks for all the tips and yeah, I’m waiting for a “like a pro” on screen
How do you run mplayer inside screen? MPlayer just won’t display a video in the framebuffer in screen for me…
dear K.Mandla,
i would really love to set up my eeepc that x-less style.
but i tried few times and couldn’t really set up my framebuffer. a nice “Like a Pro” for setting framebuffer, configuring screen and dvtm would be really nice. pardon my russian.
if you’d also include some usefull tricky autologin scripts (like autostarting screen and dvtm with some programs and playing some “welcome” sound of course).
i would really appreciate it and you’s save me much nerves on my current condition.
anyway, thanks for this blog.
If you have an nVidia card in your system, you really need to try this at the command line with mplayer:
mplayer -vo cvidix video.avi
btw, i believe, you meant alsamixer
Ooops, thanks. I’m used to typing “alsaplayer.”
Cheers. 
@ dawn
# /usr/bin/mplayer -vo fbdev file.avi
in it’s simplest form. On my main machine where I am running a framebuffer at full resolution (vga=794 – 1280×1024), i use the following to run the video at full screen
#/usr/bin/mplayer -vo fbdev -fs -vf scale=1280:-3 file.avi
on my Acer Aspire One, which only runs a framebuffer at 800×600 I use
#/usr/bin/mplayer -vo fbdev -vf scale=640:480 file.avi
Others may have better suggestions
@fuxter
.
I’m running my EeePC 1000HE with Arch without X, using KMS (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_Graphics#Kernel_mode_setting_.28KMS.29), which really improves the experience, just if you weren’t aware of it already
interesting…
*gone reading*
Until K.Mandla puts together his screen guide, (a full cli ubuntu remix might be nice someday!) Ubuntu users might want to check out the screen-profiles (now called byobu) package:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/04/ubuntu-brings-advanced-screen-features-to-the-masses.ars
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/serverguide/C/screen-profiles.html
https://launchpad.net/byobu
@Jose Catre-Vandis, thanks although that wasn’t my question. I use the fbdev driver too
. I was under the impression there was something wrong, but apparently it was specific to a single video. You can get rid of -vo fbdev by specifying the driver in ~/.mplayer/config, after xv (or whatever you use in X). mplayer plays video with whichever of the drivers that works.
By the way I’m thinking about writing a script compute the correct size for the full screen video, because mplayer’s scaling doesn’t keep the aspect ratio.
@ dawn
Yep, sorry, reread your question after I posted ans saw the word “screen” !
However mplayer works for me in screen using these commands, but have to be root or use sudo
I see what you mean now, mplayer takes over the whole display as opposed to running inside the “region” of the split.
Yes, I guess I should be a little more explicit, in that mplayer is just “painting” the video output onto the framebuffer, regardless of whatever is set to appear in that space. It’s not confined to that box, which is why it’s probably necessary to work around it.
Excuse my ignorance when I ask but…
What are the main differences between dvtm and screen-vs? Is it simply that screen allows for manual management of screen real estate while dvtm has pre ordered layouts or is there more to it?
I’ve never been a fan of screen’s method of control (:split etc.) and I find I MUCH prefer dvtm (even though I don’t care for the emacs style ^g modifier.)
For a start, Screen has a ^a modifier instead of a ^g modifier. Read the manpage for the hotkeys
Besides that, screen is a multiplexer while dvtm is a window manager. This means that dvtm doesn’t hide the borders of the windows you’ve opened (except in full-screen mode). I also think screen is a bit more advanced, since sessions can be detached and reopened later.
Everything armornick said I can concur with. I also find that responsiveness in screen is slightly better than dvtm, although (as always) I can’t really prove that and it sort just falls into the “gut feeling” category.
screen also seems to require a little reverse thinking: You arrange the “windows” as you like, then pop applications in and out. dvtm, for my money, behaves a little more like a window manager, in that you can shift windows around and reorder them.
I like screen-vs more than dvtm, but I also think dvtm has some bonuses. I tend to use whichever I feel like at the time.
That makes sense, though I still believe I’m a bit more partial to dvtm, just because I prefer the managed mode of interaction it gives me.
The modifier I was referring too was the dvtm modifier, which is ^g. I was simply commenting on how I don’t care for the emacs style of modifier keys, which are present in both dvtm and screen.
Since my query, I’ve installed screen (patched with support for vertical split) and I have to say that I like it – though I’m not a fan of the fact that i have to arrange everything as I want it to be – so I’ll probably stick with dvtm for the forseeable future. Thanks for the explanation guys
I was just curious what codec you used for that dvd-rip?
xvid, if I remember right.
Thank you for this. It seems it will be tough to get it working in Puppy, though.
Look at what you’ve done now! You just had to make me ditch X, didn’t you
One quick question: have you (or anyone else) found a good framebuffer image viewer that works inside screen? Having to exit screen to us fbi is a pain…
Never mind. I’ve solved my own problem by setting my second tty to autologin. I can just jump over there to view images
Actually, that was going to be my suggestion. I just ALT+arrow to the next terminal, and view it from there.
I’d like to give a +1 for a screen “Like a pro”