Ever since Apple’s landmark “1984” Super Bowl ad, the trend in computer interface design has been to make things look as graphical and pretty as possible. Out went the old 80×25 text-only terminal displays, the old green or amber monochrome monitors, and most user interaction being done via keyboard… in came the mouse, icons, windows, and menus. From the original Macintosh on up through the Amiga, the GEM desktop, GeoWorks, Windows, OS/2’s Presentation Manager, and to today’s OSX, Aero, and Compiz interfaces, the GUI remains the most popular form of interaction with your computer, to the point where it’s almost difficult for many to conceive of a time “BR” (Before the Rodent).

Especially in the world of GNU/Linux, however, there have been great advances in the world of the good old CLI. (That’s “Command-Line Interface,” if you’re not clued in.) Thanks to such tools as the bash shell (which remembers the last 50 commands you typed in and even offers Tab completion), GNU Screen (a terminal multiplexer allowing you to run several apps simultaneously), and an array of useful tools running the gamut from web browsers (elinks) to file managers (mc) to audio/video players (mplayer) to mail clients (mutt) to games (too many to mention) – including, of course, more text editors than could fill an NFL stadium – it is possible to do everything you use a computer for without ever having to touch a mouse. In fact, there are quite a few people who do precisely that on a daily basis, and not always out of necessity either!

There’s a new Linux distro out there, INX (Is Not X), that attempts to bring this sort of “minimalist” computing to the masses.

At its heart INX is Ubuntu (Hardy Heron 8.04 to be precise), which means you won’t have much retraining if you’re already used to the Official Linux Distro of Way of the Geek. However, it lacks any X tools; instead, everything focuses on the console, and gives you a suite of applications that allow you to do just about everything from the keyboard alone. GNU Screen is here, as are elinks, mc, mutt, the “nogui” version of mplayer, irssi (an IRC client), moc (Music On Console, a great MP3 player), a few small-but-fun games, and much more besides.

You might think this would make INX the sort of distro that appeals only to techies, gurus, and other digital savants who can tell you which end of an RS-232 port is up. (Ah, remember the classic interfaces?) However, the stated goal of INX is to actually be “newbie-friendly” in that it teaches the neophyte user about the command line, provides plenty of useful onscreen help and tutorials. INX is meant to make those who’ve never used a computer with anything other than a mouse (or similar implement) as the primary means of input feel more comfortable when presented with a keyboard and some text. (This is still a useful skill to know even in this day and age, for under-the-hood maintenance purposes if for no other reason.)

Being a text-only distro, INX is exceptionally lightweight and leaves a small footprint; the downloadable image is a mere 180MB, small enough to fit on most USB thumbdrives. But don’t be fooled by the relatively tiny size; INX is a very useful piece of software, and can easily revitalize low-end, obsolete computers that would otherwise be headed for the dump.

There are some screencasts (in the Ogg Theora format) showing INX in action, as well as a slideshow. Watching these may dispel some myths about the *nix console being a drab and confusing place only fit for the vestigial remnants of the punchcard era. Who knows, you might even like its minimalist approach!

The only major problem with INX is that, at this point, it’s primarily a LiveCD distro only. There are tools to get it installed on your hard drive, but they are experimental at best; additionally, they assume you’re installing INX as the sole OS, meaning the installers don’t handle separate partitions very well if at all. But FLOSS is seemingly always in a state of flux, so maybe down the line this criticism will vanish. Only time will tell.

In a time when most Linux distros are accused of being pretty much clones of one another (I mean, really, as much as we love Ubuntu around here, do we really need about 764 different versions of it?), it’s nice to see there are still some out there with that old “hacker” air of rugged individualism. For the adventurous, or at least the curious, INX on the one hand represents a sort of “neo-Luddite” brand of computing, a relic from the days when you could actually believe Matthew Broderick could hack into the governments’ SDI mainframe with an Imsai 8080… but on the other, it deftly recalls a simpler, perhaps more innocent time in the evolution of the computer, before rampant corporatism, sales figures, and focus groups dominated the industry.

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