Raiden's Realm: Review: Crunchbang Linux

Review: Crunchbang Linux (Page 1 of 1)

Written by NewCityVegas
Posted on: Dec 03, 2008 at 01:53pm
Section: Reviews
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Philip Newborough - Crunchbang

http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/about

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.

Download: http://www.crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/downloads
Bittorrent: http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=236d90904642eed938eded729efed7cd872bb7c8

I decided to take a look at a new Ubuntu 8.10 derivative with the unlikely name "#! CrunchBang" Linux. CrunchBang can use all the GTK+ (GNOME) applications but replaces the GNOME Desktop/Windows Manager with the lightweight high performance Openbox WM.

After booting up the CrunchBang Linux Live CD and then installing to my hard drive, my answer to my "is CrunchBang the next hot Linux distro?" question turned out to be a regrettable "not yet".

Unlike another lightweight distribution, TinyXS-max, I could not recommend #! CrunchBang to a Linux newbie. Despite being loaded with useful applications (many more than TinyXS), there are just too many extra steps to get it to be truly "user friendly", some of which are just silly.

First, I would ask, why, if you want a Linux distribution to be more popular, would you set as default, an unfriendly black desktop background? While this is easy to change: right-click Preferences->Choose Wallpaper, it should not be necessary - bad marketing, IMO.

Second, I prefer to use a notebook mouse for my Fujitsu notebook. From the menus, I could not find a way to disable my touchpad. My Fn-F4 touchpad hotkey does not work in CrunchBang although it does in TinyXS. So I found my fingers frequently brushing the touchpad while typing (with undesired results).

One feature of CrunchBang Linux is a basically icon-less desktop. While that may at first seem a bit odd, it actually works quite well since you can always right-click on the desktop background to bring up the applications and utilities menu. With a nice background, it also provides a nice, clean look. The list of application hotkeys displayed along the upper right side of the desktop is also very handy.

One of the first things I check with any new Linux distro is whether or not the sound works. Most often it does not without a minor change. CrunchBang was no exception. I pressed the "Windows Key"+"v" combination (labeled Super+v in CrunchBang) to bring up the Volume Control. "Speaker" was set to "0" and I had to move the slider up to "maximum".

Another odd choice was the Preferences->User Interface Settings. The default "CrunchBang" selection is probably the worst one. I used Firefox to view a new web site I am working on: http://gooplusplus.com I found that the center menu text was faded and hard to view. I changed the User Interface Setting selection to "Clearlooks" to fix the problem.

CrunchBang's Firefox embedded multimedia support was excellent "out-of-the-box". CrunchBang uses the Totem/Gstreamer browser plugin to handle embedded media files. I tested using Newcityvegas.com "web tv/radio" links and the various Lasvalley.com/mixx/ streaming player links
(see this forum thread).

All Windows Media, Quicktime *.mov, *.mp4, and Flash *.swf, *.flv files played without problem. I did note that Totem video frame transitions seemed a little lower quality than the TinyXS's mPlayer video, but the embedded Totem *.wmv videos loaded faster and with fewer hiccups than with the mPlayer plugin.

BTW, the three major Linux multimedia browser plugins are Totem, mPlayer, and VLC. I strongly recommend that you only install one of these. If you install more than one, there will likely be major conflicts. Also note that the "plugins" are separate from the video "applications". Using Totem's browser plugin should not conflict with using a standalone VLC application, for instance.

I should note that like many Linux distributions, booting up the Live CD did not work for me the first time. I have a Fujitsu notebook that often causes problems that are easily cured with boot parameter switches. Rather than the default "Live" login, I had to type "Live noapic nolapic" to start CrunchBang's boot process. For most people, this should not be an issue.

Unlike TinyXS, CrunchBang Linux does not acknowledge a "root" login. In fact, after a quick search of the CrunchBang site, I could not even find the default password for user "root". Instead, CrunchBang adapts the user-chosen login and password for accessing protected utilities. CrunchBang uses the familiar "sudo" for command-line terminal utilities.

Wired ethernet worked fine. IMO, at least initially, wired ethernet is almost mandatory for this distro. I am sure there are ways to make my Atheros-based wireless networking functional, but I could not find a way by just using CrunchBang menus. Although CrunchBang has a "Network Admin" utility, it is far less capable than the PCC networking submenu used by PCLOS, TinyMe, and TinyXS. For CrunchBang WPA/WPA2 secure wireless networking, I would guess that some Terminal command-line magic may be required.

To try to get my wireless networking going, I started up System->Restricted Device Manager. After entering my user password, CrunchBang found the driver for my notebook's Atheros 802.11 LAN card. After "unlocking" System->Network Admin->Wireless Connection->Properties, I could see my router's WPA-enabled network SSID (signal at 74%). I prefer using a static IP, so, I set up my addresses accordingly. Although CrunchBang's NetAdmin utility provides for a network password, it was inexplicably limited to WEP and not WPA. Bottomline: I never could get my wireless up and running although I'm sure I was close - probably just a command-line tweak away.

In theory, a big reason to choose CrunchBang over another lightweight distro like TinyXS, is the bigger and more frequently updated Ubuntu software repositories. One of the first things one should do after installing a Linux distro to hard disk is to update using the Synaptic Package Manager (System->Package Manager). Compared to TinyXS (fewer apps), this takes quite a long time. Procedure: start up Synaptic, click "Reload" then "Mark All Upgrades" and eventually click "Apply".

At under 700MB, the CrunchBang ISO CDROM packs a lot of great programs. After a hard disk install, that translates to about 2.5GB of used disk space, about 20% more than the TinyXS distro. Note that TinyXS comes complete with OpenOffice instead of CrunchBang's Abiword, Gnumeric, etc. While CrunchBang seems to be as fast as TinyXS, it uses much more RAM. At idle, TinyXS typically uses 50MB of memory while CrunchBang uses 200MB. For older PCs, this may be important but for more modern PCs, it is probably inconsequential.

The hard-disk install was simple with limited choices. My Fujitsu notebook already had three OS's on it: Windows XP, TinyXS Linux, and 64Studio Linux. Fortunately, although I was not prompted for my other OS boot partitions, after my initial hard disk bootup, the CrunchBang text-only GRUB boot menu picked up my notebook's TinyXS MBR GRUB entry but not my Windows XP boot entry!!! Since I prefer TinyXS's GRUB menu "look" and its ability to more accurately recognize other OS boot entries, I will change it back later.

WARNING: If you already have another OS on your hard drive (Windows or Linux), I DO NOT RECOMMEND ALLOWING CRUNCHBANG to create an MBR boot menu.

First impression bottomline: #! CrunchBang combines a good balance of performance and features that I seek. Unlike PCLOS or TinyXS, CrunchBang is not a good distro choice for Linux newbies because too much remains to be done after initial installation. The stark black default background, inability to quickly disable my touchpad, and incomplete wireless networking were significant annoyances.

On the plus side, out-of-the-box inclusion of multimedia codecs and plugins, Flash support, Java 6 runtime, etc. saved a lot of time. I was impressed that my Windows partition NTFS files were automatically accessible using the Thunar file manager. (I did not check to see if they were "writeable" or not.) Another nice surprise was how quickly my USB thumbdrive "automounted" for easy file access.

I plan to keep CrunchBang on my hard drive to explore more of the apps included and to check out other functionality (printing support, etc.) The right-click applications menus are well organized, but I think that the default CrunchBang install should have added more panel applets to the bottom taskbar (right-click the taskbar area) especially "Menu", "Directory Menu", and "Net Status".

While the taskbar "Menu" may seem to duplicate much of the right-click desktop menu, there are significant differences. For instance, even though both menus include a Synaptic selection, when I tried to add OpenOffice using the desktop menu's System->Package Manager, OpenOffice was NOT added to the desktop menu. In contrast, when I used the taskbar's menu "System Tools->Add/Remove" to add OpenOffice, updates were automatically made to the taskbar menu.

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