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Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsWhat are some GUI-less operating systems?
Hey gang,
I've been watching the awesome "Console Foundations" course and I would like to immerse myself in an old operating system that only utilizes the Command Line Interface. What are some operating systems that I could download?
3 Answers
webapi
4,755 PointsSeveral current Linux distributions offer an option during installation to exclude the installation of a display environment. Debian, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu (server) all have this ability.
Ken Alger
Treehouse TeacherYan;
I started out in my computing days utilizing PC and MS-DOS. You <i>might</i> be able to find a version of it to download, but I am guessing that it would have no idea as to what to do on a modern computer. For example, my first PC used PC-DOS, the version escapes me, and had 256kb of RAM, which was double what most folks had. It had two 5.25" floppy drives and no hard drive. Trying to get it to recognize 4GB of RAM or a 750GB HDD would be impossible. That being said, if you can find a mid/early 80's computer, something that was around pre Windows 3.1, command line will be your ticket.
For a realistic experience, I would stick with a current Linux distribution and dual boot your machine. Surprisingly, you can do quite a bit in the command line environment even on Windows 8.1, Linux distributions that include a GUI, and I believe on current Macs. I would recommend spending some time trying to do a few things utilizing the command line in your current operating system, you can accomplish and learn a lot.
On Windows machines you can download software that emulates Linux terminals (Cygwin is what I use) that utilizes the command line.
Best of luck.
Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsWow, I can't believe how much times have changed. We still have files that are kilobytes small and so much storage now. I wonder if there ever will be a time where we won't fill up the storage that's given to us by the hard disk... some day! I remember floppy disks... the good old days :)
James Barnett
39,199 PointsI'd suggest you run Linux in a VM. The easiest way to do that is to download TurnKey Linux's Core Appliance. It's a Debian server, no GUI installed.
- Install Virtual Box
- Download the
OVFbuild of TurnKey Core
Yan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsYan Kozlovskiy
Courses Plus Student 13,773 PointsThank you. I'm downloading Ubuntu right now... Here's to hoping that I could figure out how to run the installer to exclude the graphical installation.