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Debian + Openbox = CrunchBang Linux (Video)
"CrunchBang Linux is a Debian based distro with the Openbox window manager on top of it. So it is Debian under the hood with Openbox on the surface," says distro supporter Larry Cafiero. A glance through the #! (CrunchBang) forums showed an exceptionally fast response rate to problems posted there, so even if you haven't heard of #! (it's not in the DistroWatch Top 10), it has a strong and dedicated user community -- which is one of the major keys to success for any open source project. In order to learn more about #! Linux (and to share what he learned), Timothy Lord pointed his camcorder at Larry during LinuxFest Northwest and made this video record of their conversation.
For a lightweight distro, it's pretty well thought-out and has some nice extras over a default Openbox install, plus the devs understand the concept of "discoverability" in that they have a list of keyboard shortcuts in the top-right by default. Unlike lighter distros, it's not crippled by being limited to whatever the devs and community can package up or you compile on your own (like, say, DSL or Puppy) since it's backed by the Debian archive.
This distro will work a treat for your old Pentium III laptop.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
There's also a distribution for the Raspberry Pi "inspired by" CrunchBang, called PiBang, which is based on the Raspbian distribution. I'll have to look at that one; the nature of the Pi makes it easy to switch distros by just changing out the SD card.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I'd say it was definitely an isolated occurrence. I use Crunchbang on all of my machines, and have found the community surrounding the distro to be very friendly whenever I've popped into the forums. I was able to meet Phil and Becky Newborough at a barcamp a couple years ago as well, and they're one of the nicest couples you could have at the forefront of your distro. :)
"CrunchBang Linux is a Debian based distro with the Openbox window manager on top of it. So it is Debian under the hood with Openbox on the surface,"
So why should I install CrunchBang Linux instead of, say... I don't know ... Debian pure blend Wheezy with Openbox?
At least I (and DistroWatch) have heard of Debian.
All a distro is just a specific collection of software/packages that is given a name.
That's it and by that definition...this is a distro. Pretty simple.
Crunchbang like many other distros is in fact more than that. It is a collection of packages and customizations to those packages...AND the accompaning community of developers and users....that come together to make a distro unique.
I've been running Debian since about 1999... and I've been using Openbox since about... 2003? 2004? Does that mean that I was running #! before it existed?
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
The best forums I ever encountered were the Gentoo forums. The OS is a pain in the ass if you don't want to update every couple weeks but the amount of help, howto's and other stuff available on the Gentoo forums frankly blows away every other forum I've ever encountered. And though Gentoo has a bad reputation for RTFM in fact I found their forums to be beyond helpful to total newbies (though I wasn't a newbie).
I thought years ago that Debian + OpenBox == Knoppix?
All a distro is just a specific collection of software/packages that is given a name.
That's it and by that definition...this is a distro. Pretty simple.
Crunchbang like many other distros is in fact more than that. It is a collection of packages and customizations to those packages...AND the accompaning community of developers and users....that come together to make a distro unique.
Crunchbang Shill!
Fess up. How much free software are they giving you to get you to post this stuff?
And, yes, you can call your distro "Gothmollix", you don't even have to replace any of the inards if you want, just the name. If you're distributing it, it's a distribution AKA "Distro".
Install scripts, mostly dev stuff. Apache, mysql, postgres. There's a nice default gui. If there is another debian + openbox + web dev install scripts distro that I am unaware of, or if you've got your own custom debian image, then maybe this isn't that useful.
Probably if dpkg works for you, you aren't their target audience.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Your right, Crunchbang is essentially Debian with a dark theme - that's one of the reasons I like it so much.
The reason I use it over vanilla Debian is that all of the manual configuration and package selection that I'd do with a Debian netinstall is already done in Crunchbang. A couple config tweaks, and my system's fully-configured. They do add a lot of helper bash scripts and they add some custom packages in their repo, but mostly I use it because it's a Debian + Openbox installation with sensible defaults.
Saying that it's not a distro just because they don't include a custom compiled GNU/Hurd kernel and a fully reimplemented software repository is a little short-sighted. Half the Linux distros in existence are mostly Debian at their core.
Crunchbang Shill!
Fess up. How much free software are they giving you to get you to post this stuff?
If I hadn't let my mod points expire, you'd get them for this.
Hilarious.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yeah, the bar at the top is the tint2 (https://code.google.com/p/tint2/) panel / taskbar. It's very configurable - the config options are well documented on their project page.
I would think the usual order of things is BANG-> CRUNCH... :o)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I used CrunchBang for a brief period of time not too long ago, and while I didn't spend that much time on the forums, I have no complaints about my experience there. A needed to ask one question, I received an answer--no problem. I browsed around a bit and the community there seems nice.
You must have popped into #archlinux by accident :)
Seriously though, on the forums, the #! guys (and girls!) are some of the nicest in the Linux community.
systemd is against the UNIX philosophy of making many tools that each do one simple thing well, rather than a few tools that each do many things. (The Linux kernel also violates this principle. Just read what Tannenbaum has to say on the matter if you want more.) And it shows.
Consider how systemd handles logging. Instead of cat /var/log/messages.log and all the tools we have for handling text, things like grep, awk, sed, vi and emacs, have to run this "journalctl" command, which I had to find out about by nagging people and poking around. I know documentation is for wimps, but please. A web page listing SystemV and BSD methods of system administration, important files, initialization processes and such, side by side with the new systemd equivalents, would have been most helpful. Judging from the slowness of journalctl at retrieving relatively new messages, I thought that they might be stored in some sort of compressed format. I do not know how systemd handles logging, and that's a knock against it right there. Surely it must store logs in some file, somewhere on the system. This location is not mentioned in the journalctl man page. With some digging, I turned up /var/log/journal/someobfuscateddirname/ for the location. The "file" command showed that system.journal is a FoxPro file! And, no, it's not compressed, it's binary, and it takes a while to query. Maybe using a database file format is a good idea, but (assuming the file utility correctly identified the file type) why FoxPro? FoxPro is still proprietary. We have Berkeley DB, MongoDB (and other NoSQL DBs), and even heavy duty stuff like MariaDB (MySQL), and Postgres, but the systemd designers chose FoxPro?! What did they do in journalctl, include a FoxPro engine?
What was said to me was not actually STFU, it was: "The last paragraph of your post was unnecessary as it's a rant and the issues you raised were covered multiple times already." Which sure sounds like STFU to me.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"