Update 20090708 pm: More CrunchBang

Posting this while running crunchbang from USB. I have to admit I’m pretty impressed so far. It boots up with a minimalist look. It has a decent variety of default applications. Even the conkyrc is set up with a list of default keybindings so the user doesn’t have to click anything to get a menu or open an application. Nice touch.

I made a few tweaks, starting with “xsetroot -solid darkslategrey” and then moving conky down a few pixels so the tint2 bar (full width) could be  moved up.

I like the idea of sticking configuration files for things in the menu. I did similarly in some of my old jwm menus so I could change  things more easily when setting up themes and such. Another nice touch.

I also noticed when I logged out that dwm and dmenu are installed. The one thing I didn’t care for was the sound effect with gdm.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the apps aren’t exactly my first choices. That’s fine. A few minutes with aptitude and everything should be okay. I just made a list of packages to sort through and see what I might want to change around. One thing I just tested and think I can toss is rhythmbox. It didn’t detect my S3 after I enabled the MTP plugin. I see libmtp is installed but not mtp-tools. No surprises in any of that.

As far as hardware goes, the Synaptics touch pad works fine and I’m not seeing any problems with the wireless card yet. The problem with that is, it occurs sporadically and (seemingly) spontaneously.

Eight hours ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d install this. Now I’m trying to figure out reasons — other than it’s based on Ubuntu — not to.

Update 20090708: crunchbang, etc.

Following up on a recommendation from kruce, I saw there was a new release of crunchbang (#!) and decided to download it since it’s been a while since I last looked at it. I wanted to see if it would work better on my AA1 than Fedora, particularly with the ath5k problem I’ve had. I also want to see how much lighter it is than Xubuntu.

I ran into a problem trying  to get the latest ISO:

Oh well. I’ll try again later. Even though it’s based on Ubuntu.

I’m seriously looking at alternatives to Fedora 10, including Fedora 11 despite some problems I’ve noticed (including broken Synaptics driver and requirement for ext4 root partition when installing from the live CD). I ran the KDE image again the other day. As much as I like KDE and its integration, it’s a bit much for my AA1’s lone GB of RAM. And I think I’d wait for PCLOS 2009.3 if I were really KDE-inclined.

More soon, maybe.

UPDATE 15:28 US/Central - 8 July 2009: Still no luck with the “official” download link which isn’t mirrored. The forum has torrent links and others are making the ISOs — some of them anyway (understandable since most people would ordinarily only download one or two depending on architecture and whether they want the regular ISO, the lite ISO, or both) — available on their servers. First success in starting the download from the main site resulted in failure; the server timed out and I couldn’t reconnect to it. I wanted to download the lite ISO but the only link I saw for it was via The Pirate Bay; that would require a change in DNS servers since my ISP blocks TPB. Trying to get the regular ISO now (really big thanks to those hosting). It’s very slow and tedious, though.

UPDATE 2 – 17:15 US/Central – 8 July 2009: (EDITED AND SCREENSHOTS ADDED) Got it downloaded and installed to USB thumbdrive via unetbootin. First boot was faster than I thought it would be. Default keyboard came up as GB, no problemo. Freaking NetworkManager again. Got connected to my router, no problem. Kept an eye for messages related to my Atheros card freaking out like in Fedora, but nothing in the short time I was running #!.  (I downloaded latest kernel sources to try and see if that fixes the problem with the card flaking out.)

Here are a couple screenshots. Nothing special, just screen and some pinging.

 

The RAM use in conky was cache, actual memory used was closer to 530 after running Firefox. That’s very admirable compared to other things I’ve run off USB.

Will I install? Ummm, don’t know yet. I want to give the lite version a spin first because this has some stuff on it that I’ll replace anyway. To its credit, it recognizes my hard drive as /dev/sda and the USB stick as /dev/sdb, which means it should install (e. g., GRUB) properly if I do put it on my hard drive.