[wuug-list] Collaboration Projects?

[Matt Draisey]

On Tue, 2008-06-17 at 14:28 -0400, Aaron Mavrinac wrote:
> I've seen quite a few of these "rescue" CDs, but they all seem to
> imply that you're only popping it in to fix stuff so you can get back
> to your graphical desktop.
> 
> What I'm proposing would involve probably developing a custom
> slang/curses-based shell, with heavy emphasis on using screen (or
> maybe there's something like this out there?).
> 
> Some stuff it might include:
> 
> - Midnight Commander
> - vim, fully loaded
> - Emacs, fully loaded
> - Links
> - Pine/mutt
> - slrn
> - ncftp
> - irssi
> - mcabber
> - cmus
> - TPP
> - MySQL
> - Nethack
> - FreeBSD textmode games
> - CLI components of many other apps
> 
> Since console apps are usually very small, we can put various options
> for the same type of app and give users lots of flexibility.
> 
> Basing it on Gentoo would make sense, not only because I'm highly
> biased but because USE="-X" should allow us to build most things
> without any X lib dependencies.

Your distro already exists and just happens to be one of the behemoths.
Debian is as console friendly as a precompiled distro can be.  Packages
which can be compiled with or without X support usually have package
alternatives and generally reasonable dependencies.  Debian is still
widely used as a console only distro and the debian faithful would
mutiny if that ever changed.