Earlier in the spring I changed the distro on my Linux machine from Ubuntu to a remastered distribution called CrunchBang Linux. It was lightweight, simple, and elegant. Perfect for my machine with low specs. It did what I needed it to without any issue. Well recently there was a release of CrunchBang Linux 9.04.01, based off of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.

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• lxpanel has been replaced by the lightweight tint2 as the panel/taskbar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.