You can do your part to help them out a couple different ways like making a donation (donations can be made here) or just spreading the word around by reposting their plan all over the web or by sporting one of these nifty Ubunchu banners on your website. And what is spreading the love without some free goodies that can be found at C-quel’s post here on DeviantArt.

In case you missed any links, here they are specifically labeled in a non-specific order:

• Full Release Info – [link]
• Ubunchu author’s page – [link]
• Ubuntu Mass. LoCo Team’s Page (the awesome guys behind this effort) – [link]
• Donation page for the Ubuntu Mass. LoCo’s effort – [link]
• C-quel’s Ubunchu goodies list – [link]

Changes

Right off the bat while downloading my copy of the distro, I noticed it was smaller than the first release. CrunchBang 8.10 was 666MB, while 9.04 was only 620MB. Sure it’s only 42MB, but a smaller build is quite the improvement.

The overall changes to this release from 8.10.02 have been kept to an overall minimum:

• lxpanel has been replaced by the lightweight tint2 as the panel/taskbar
• Deluge was dropped as the BitTorrent client, and is replaced by Transmission
• There is now a full installation of Vim
• The python based text editor, Pyroom, is included by default
• Improved documentation is added to the default configuration files
• Openbox menu items added for commonly used configuration files
• A new and improved default Gtk and Openbox themes
• Additional Openbox and Gtk+ themes installed, including the popular Dyne themes

One of the other things it brings to the table is ext4 harddrive format support. What this does is allow for faster boot times; sure it is only a slight increase from ext3, but hey faster is better either way. It also now comes in a 64-Bit edition as well as 32-Bit edition. CrunchBang now also has increased wireless card support.

My Thoughts

All in all I felt this was a great release of CrunchBang. The initial boot time was short, which is great and gives me more time to get right to what I need to do. Right out of the box I didn’t need to try messing around with my wifi card drivers like I had to when I used Intrepid Ibex, and got online easily and updated any software packages. One of the first applications I was eager to try was Pyroom, and like the description states it was distractionless writing; you can also easily theme it to suit your liking. Speaking of theming I decided to mess around with the theme of CrunchBang. It was fairly simple to use the gui for gtk+ and openbox theme, and I got it looking very pretty if I say so myself. In my last installation I hadn’t been a huge fan of lxpanel, so I installed gnome-panel and used that because I was familiar with it. But this release comes with tint2 by default, so I figured I would give it a try. The config file was easily accessed via the openbox menu, and it was simple to edit. After a few simple tweaks to an already great release, I resulted with this:

I feel that this is a nice lightweight distro that anyone should try out, even just for kicks. Is my opinion biased because I am a CrunchBanger? Maybe…so, here are the downloads:

Downloads

To download CrunchBang 32-Bit, 64-Bit, or Lite Editions, follow this link. Iso’s can be downloaded via http and bittorrent.

Google Chrome OS is planned for release on netbooks in the second half of 2010.

To quote Google on their new OS :

“It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

So ladies and gents, will this new OS help bring Linux into the spotlight better than Ubuntu? Will this be the beginning of a new ‘OS War’ seeing as Google is bringing it home to the PC front? Only time will tell, stay tuned action fans!

via Official Google Blog

Right off the bat I noticed that the network no longer had its WEP key. For those of you that have no clue what a WEP key does: A WEP key uses an algorithm, now deprecated by WPA and WPA2, to secure the wireless transmissions from eavesdroppers and to keep things private. While it is deprecated and WPA or WPA2 should be used, it will do just fine for a home network in an area where your neighbors aren’t hackers or script kiddies.

Seeing as there no longer was any sort of encryption, I decided to see exactly how many people were on the network. I counted 6, we only had 2 PCs active. Obviously we needed to put the encryption back on to prevent people from sniping our bandwidth. Seeing as I just finished up a Redhat course and was just itching to try out some bash scripts, I whipped up this:

#!/bin/bash
# Filename: loopping
while [ 1 ]
do
        ping $1 -s 64 -t 5
 
        sleep 300
 
done

Meet my “Infinite Ping” script or ‘loopping’. What it does is allows you to pick an ip or PC name and send 64 bytes of data to your target for 5 minutes, while sleeping for that 5 minutes and repeating once more until a connection is lost. I used it to ‘kick’ unauthorized users from my wireless network.

What this does is flood the target PC’s connections with a constant stream of data packets, of course your PC also slows down a bit cause you are sending all of the packets. All you have to do is substitute ‘pcname’ with an ip or the PC’s actual name. To use it, put it in either the /bin or your local /home/username/bin directory and simply type:

$ loopping pcname

Download the bash script here.

Disclaimer: Please note that this script is purely for educational purposes only and bumping freeloaders off your network. All responsibility for misuse of this script is that of its users.