NetworkManager (again) and Xubuntu

I now recommend Xfce to n00bs yet undecided on exactly which WindowManager they need.
NetworkManager seems to be very temperamental, if you do use that Gnome bloatware!

#! 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... :-)

mint xfce menu

mint updates break mint's elegant xfce menu. first login asks whether you want to keep, migrate or replace the old menu. it doesn't matter what you choose. apparently the old menu in incompatible with the new update.

i did not want to manually code the xfce menu, to avoid incompatibilities with future mint updates. reluctantly, i had to use the memory-hungry but presentable gnome-menu instead.

edit: just discovered the bug and solution here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/806859
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=74615

linux mint debian xfce

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1725
very impressed with the neat and sleek looks, light requirements and speed, i'm starting to recommend this over ubuntu, to my newbie-linux windows converts.

http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/linuxmint-xfce-201104-dvd-32bit.iso.torrent
not impressed that the only way to install is via dvd only. mint could learn from debian in having a minimal netinstall, and pulling required packages after basic install.

installation was a breeze. very clean. system reboot. restart is quite quick. desktop looks elegant.

the first update+upgrade pulls in quite a lot, and makes very noticable changes.