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X11 in ASCII
ChristTrekker submitted a story that we probably have run once upon a time, but hey, it's a holiday weekend, and who doesn't enjoy reading about a X11 in ASCII graphics? Complete with screenshots and code for you do it yourselfers. I like the enlightenment screenshots. Painful.
its actually cell-shaded, antialiased 3d objects that need a radeon 9800 to run
menu shadows in GTK, and X11 in ascii- what dumb idea will we come up with next, the Windows UI in linux?
oh, wait...
Does it have menu shadows, though?
oww ooooo somebody just *had* to invent something more painful than reading RFC's..... anyone got Tylenol? Please?
C|N>K
Now all my pr0n can be
asciipr0n!!!!
Now excuse me, I'm off to do some *ahem* research...
A new release of OS/2 ???
There are mirrors of photos, dumps and the original site.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
88 49 49
The slashdot effect has now been confirmed to severly affect text-centric sites even on slow holiday weekends
my eyees!! my eyes!!!!
My eyes are ASCII-allergic you insensitive clod!
Google Cache:
Main Page:
Here
i would link the rest of the site but it's all screenshots which google doesn't cache.
Runnin' On Empty
Yahoo cacheF www.meow.org.uk%2Fstan%2Fxserver%2F
(google didn't have it... StRaNgE...)
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=http%3A%2F%2
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
aalib-based X server
:-)
:-)
How?
First of all, I compiled aalib, which seemed a good start.
Then I found GGI, which acts as an abstraction layer. It provides a standard interface, and will render (among others) as X, svgalib or (conveniently enough) aalib.
XGGI is a patched XFree 3 server, which as you can guess, uses GGI for its display. It'll quite happily render X using aalib.
Last stage was to tweak the text mode. 80x25 was far too small. Each character on-screen represents a 2x2 pixel block, so my X server was running at 160x50. Booting linux with 'vga=ask' wasn't very productive -- it only seemed to report standard VGA text modes (eg, 80x43, 80x50).
Poking around, I discovered SVGATextMode, which will tweak VGA text modes using modelines similar to XF86Config's. Fiddling with its config file somehwat I managed to get 100x60 running, which with an 8x8 font gives me 800x480, the limit of this laptop's LCD. My X server was now running at 200x120.
Almost useable. Time to try some apps
Enlightment, KDE, RealPlayer 8, Netscape Navigator (among others) all seemed fairly happy running at such a low resolution. Some are nicer than others about how they handle it, though -- eg, wrapping menus when they become too large. There are quirks -- the server doesn't seem to recognise ctrl, alt or even shift being pressed, and I can't have a large virtual desktop to scroll around in -- but on the whole it's not too bad.
Why?
It struck me as a nice idea to be able to play DVDs without having the bottleneck of a fairly poor graphics card. aalib seemed like a natural alternative... No luck yet, but I'm still trying
Actually, that's a lie. It just seemed like a cool thing to do.
I've always wondered why people rarely read the article. Now I know that it's because TFA is usually slashdoted before most people can read them.
X
+0 Veeeery intereshting... but shtupid.
somehow, I doubt that blind people are interested in screen after screen that say "Error 404: object not found"...
Maybe the screenshots should have been done in ascii instead of jpeg?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
He says he wanted to watch DVDs, and I can't understand why he would need X for that. mplayer supports -vo aa to render using aalib, without all the overhead of an xserver.
I've even actually used it once on a computer that was too slow to play DVDs in X. It was far from enjoyable, but still impressive.
The folowing is just as true of Solarus (closed micro kernel) as is of Linux (open monolythic)
This sort of thing is why you need to let end users edit/replace as much code as they can.
You can do useless but cool things like this while not being bloated with useless and unwanted 'features'
Sealed systems that don't let end users change things around end up having every feature possable in the system and still lack features users want.
But when you let them change things (eather by open source or micro kernel) then you get all kinds of funky cool features.
Even ones that don't really have any practical application. Oh wait did someone say this will work for brail terminals? Well guess this IS practical after all.
But we'd never know that if it wasn't for the ability to replace the X11 system with this funky hack.
I don't actually exist.
Somebody should take a screenshot of X11 ASCII running TTYQuake in a window. :P
I seriously doubt anyone visually impaired will be able to understand anything of the text after it passes through aalib.
anyway, there are tactile displays that can handle regular (high contrast) screens just fine, AFAIK.
Virtouch and ABTIM, for example.
could do the same thing without programming. PC Anywhere running on a DOS 3.3 box actually tried to render the Windows screen in ascii. It was freaky.
Thank god that technology hasn't been lost!
So the local coffee shop smartly provides free WiFi, in exchange for geeks like me spending all day there buying coffee and food. I'm sitting there, 1600x1200 screen w/ a maximized ssh session into my devbox, watching parsed packet traces blaze across my screen as fast as MySQL could select them.
:-)
An unknown voice behind me laughs. "Whatcha doin' man, lookin' at porn?"
Perfunctory hello. Evil grin. "Don't you know it." A few minutes later, mplayer's compiled on the FreeBSD system, and what else can I do but...
ssh effugas@devbox "mplayer -vo aa Dark_Angel.avi"
SSH, Mplayer, and AALib: When you absolutely, positively, maybe even desperately need something to watch.
"Excuse me. I have something you might want to see."
It even drew a bit of a crowd
Of course, you might have noticed the Dark Angel avi. Triple-DES or not, I wasn't about to drop Debbie does ASCII in the middle of a coffee shop. So I settled for the next best thing, the Fecal Tootsie Pop...sweet on the outside...absolute crap once you bite in.
Yeah, yeah. Too little sleep, too much Gord. It's all about having a bit of fun with things...ain't nothin' wrong with that.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Interesting? Jesus.
Let me pretend I'm an ASCII text reader, so you can get a magical glimpse into ASCII X-Terminals for the blind:
"En En En En En En Cee Cee Cee Dash Equals Dash Equals Cee Cee Kay Five Dash Seven Cee..."
Blind user, after 20 minutes: "Wow! That's a Back button!"
Pretty damn useful technology.
Ouch... imagine running a screenreader... The horror, the pain...
but seriously, wouldn't a screenreader read every letter out loud? I could imagine this would be an excrutiating experience. "hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen a a a a a a a a a a a hyphen hyphen hyphen o o o o o hyphen o o o... etc"
Nope, doesn't improve usability I guess
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
It should work well with the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC!
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
NOBODY expects a Slashdotting! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless bandwidth usage.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless bandwidth usage...and an almost fanatical devotion to Open Source.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.