#! crunchbang 10 statler r20110207

For a while now, I have been hearing and thinking about crunchbang linux, or #! as the community calls it. So finally, I decided to dive in and install crunchbang-10-20110207-openbox-i686 on my spare laptop.

I have been recommending Linux Mint Debian XFCE lately to newbies. I am rethinking that now. It seems LMDX still has a lot of dependencies on Gnome and other bloatwares hanging on from its legacy days. For example, the XFCE Edition uses Gnome-Terminal rather than XFCE-Terminal. IMHO, that defeats the purpose of not wanting to use Gnome.

#! seems to be smoother and slicker at first glance. I like what I see, although the initial install used almost 2G of diskspace. There is a lot of gnome/etc bloatware which shouldn't have made it to this supposedly minimalist openbox distribution. Mint seems not much worse compared to this. (But compare this to my debian-wheezy laptop setup, with everything I need, on about 650M diskspace!!)

dd if=crunchbang-10-20110207-openbox-i686.iso of=/dev/{usb-drive}
was sufficient and simple to make a usb key for testing or install.

For some strange reason, I had trouble booting #! cd/usb. Apparently, it could be due to my screen - max resolution 1024x768. I almost gave up before I understood the issue. Wonder who the #! developers are targetting?

So I edit the grub boot menu, and append vga=773, and only then was I able to boot #! cd/usb to test or install. The install was fairly smooth with no major concerns, except that the drive partitioner seemed to be creating partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries. I reinstalled, after manually partitioning my drive with fdisk.

So, now I have a pristine install of #! waiting to be devoured.

Initial tasks were to update the system:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

#! /etc/apt/sources.list points to German servers, instead of UK ones, which lagged, due to about twice the network distance/time. It was fairly simple to replace de with uk. Since, #! tracks debian-stable (squeeze), and the installer contents are about 8mths old, about ~250M of initial upgrades were waiting. Squeeze is stable and updates shouldn't be frequent, except the security ones.

Then, I installed some of my missing favourites:
- rdate
- localepurge
- ncdu
- tmux
- most

Keep an eye here for my #! adventures... :-)