CrunchBang

v 0.2.7

A couple of nights ago, I was sitting in the bar at my hotel in Melbourne whilst consuming my accumulated drink vouchers, when an elderly lady who had clearly been enjoying the hospitality of the establishment started randomly haranguing groups of patrons as to the greatness of John Oppenheimer.  This enjoyable "impromptu theatre" was terminated when she was quietly led away.

What has this to do with the subject?  Everything.  Mr Oppenheimer was one of the major contributors to the ultimate "CrunchBang" at the aptly named "Trinity Site".  So CrunchBang stuck in my mind and the more I read about it, the more I liked it (the Linux Distro that is).

This minimalist distro is built directly upon a Debian Squeeze Netinstall and uses the Openbox window manager.  The Debian Backports and a Crunchbang repository are also used.  It is installed using a modified Debian Installer script, and like Ubuntu and a few other distros, the sudo command is used for administrator privileges.  A "cb-welcome" bash script enables additional functionality to be installed, however I found it failed when the technique to detect an internet connection simply wouldn't work.  Iceweasel release (the latest) is included along with Flash.

I installed it in Virtualbox just as described in a previous post, though with a smaller "disk" and less memory.

This is definitely not a beginner-friendly distro.  Straight up, editing of the sources.list is needed to tailor it for closer Debian repositories, and commenting out the "check-internet-connection" line in the "/usr/bin/cb-welcome" script is needed.  Simple, but a show-stopper for many.

HOWEVER

I REALLY like Crunchbang.  Why?  Crunchbang is built the way I think many more distros should be built that expand or modify a parent distro (in this case Debian Stable).  It uses the parent distro as a base and modifies it with additional repositories and scripts.  At all times you can go back and use the documentation of the parent distro.  This is truly using the "standing on the shoulders of giants" technique and benefits both the user and the Distro maintainer by (in this case) using what Debian has provided and improving just what needs to be tidied up for what that person wants.  No re-invented wheels needed.



Later .....

Update:
The initial install uses 70 meg memory at idle and just under 1.9 gig disk space.

Update 11 Feb.
I encourage you to visit the Crunchbang support forums.  There are some really good posts with some great advice for modifying systems (how to for Xfce for example) or setup Conky (which I've become somewhat enamoured with).
In addition, Openbox has started to grow on me.  Combined with the Debian Menu system it is really quite slick.