I first heard about this distro on Linux Outlaws podcast, checked out the EEE user forums and found poeple had got it installed on their Asus EEE's, so I decided to download and install on my 701. This is what the official website has to say about Crunchbang :-
"CrunchBang Linux" is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customised from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality."
Once installed I found this to be a very fast 'buntu' derivative, with most of the apps you would generally need already installed. It comes with codecs pre-installed, so dont try this if you must have total freedom of open source!
In some ways it is very similar to Mint, in that it tries to work out of the box for most users, just with a smaller window manager.
On the EEE install a few things did not work straight away, such as the WIFI and shutdown, this was corrected by installing an EEE kernel, which was remarkably simple, details can be found on the Crunchbang website.
The need to swap kernels has now been superseded as there is now an official EEE version of crunchbang called Crunch-EEE.
The distro has a strong forum, with the author seemly greeting everyone in person himself.
Something else that is new to me on this distro is Conky, a kind of info bar that places itself over the desktop. This can be configured to display anything from kernel revision to diskspace to the local weather! configuring and modifying it can be extremely addictive, and many hours lost on forums with other conky enthusiasts/addicts!
The default list of Apps is as follows:-
Internet & Comms
- Firefox 3 web browser
- Claws Mail e-mail client
- Liferea feed reader
- gFTP FTP client
- Deluge BitTorrent client
- Skype VoIP Client
- XChat IRC client
- Gwibber microblogging client
- Pidgin IM client
- GNOME network tools
Graphics
- GIMP image editor
- Inkscape vector graphics editor
- GPicView image viewer
- Gcolor colour selector
- Agave palette designer
- Specimen font previewer
- FontyPython
- XSane image scanner
- Take Screenshot +’ Now’ See scrot commands
- Take Screenshot ’ In 5 Seconds’ See scrot commands
- Online Tools ’ Color Lovers ’ x-www-browser ColourLovers.com
- Online Tools ’ Color Hunter ’ x-www-browser colorhunter.com
- Online Tools ’ Vector Magic ’ x-www-browser Vector Magic
- Online Tools ’ Favicon from Pics ’ x-www-browser Favicon from Pics
Office
- AbiWord Word Processor
- Gnumeric Spreadsheet
- Evince PDF viewer
- Calculator
Sound & Video
- Totem movie player
- Rhythmbox music player
- Audacity audio editor
- PiTiVi video editor
- Kino video editor
- Create Screencast gtk-recordMyDesktop
- Cheese Webcam App
- Sound Juicer CD extractor
- Serpentine audio CD creator
- Sound Recorder
- Sound Converter
- Volume control
Tools & Utilities
Preferences
- Openbox Config GUI Menu Editor obmenu
- Openbox Config GUI Config Tool obconf
- Gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme
- Choose Wallpaper - Nitrogen
