Computer usage without a display server and graphics accelaration card.

[Someone]

Lets assume i refuse to install a display server. I want to read pdfs, listen to audio files, and if possible watch videos even slower and in lower quality. Can i use the framebuffer directly? Thanks.
Browsing will be done with links, lynx, w3m, elinks etc.

 

[T-Daemon]

I want to read pdfs

There are command line tools which can read PDFs, but without images, no hyperlinks, etc. misc/lesspipe is such a tool. There might be other tools I'm not aware of, or don't recall.

listen to audio files,

There are command line music player in the ports tree, e.g. audio/cmus and multimedia/musikcube, to name two.

if possible watch videos

It's possible to watch videos in the framebuffer, multimedia/mpv is capable of playing them. But it requires a drm-kmod video driver loaded.

 

[freethread]

The misc/mc viewer (aka mcview) can view a lot of files, PDF too. Just play with F8 and F9 keys while viewing. It also depends on the configuration file /usr/local/etc/mc/mc.ext.ini (and/or its user counterpart in %{HOME}/.config/mc if any). However PDF can be viewed as text (no images) by default (with default configuration file).

 

[drhowarddrfine]

graphics/mupdf

 

[Kai Burghardt]

Just for crossreferencing: You may be interested in:​

• Thread 101021 – FreeBSD on only TTY as a Daily Driver​
• Thread 86782 – Playing videos in pure console via framebuffer (no X!)​
• Thread 78500 – Can I use multimedia/mpv with framebuffer in kms console?​
• Thread 70361 – A day without X11 ?​
• Thread 66800 – Reading .pdf from the command line?​
• Thread 66672 – Image viewer for the console.​