Lightweight Crunch Bang Linux
June 7, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under The Free World.
Looking out for a lightweight distro for the heck of it is interesting. If you look at Distrowatch there are a lot of distros there and the name Crunch Bang just stood out for me so I had to click the link to its page. It is described as a faster Ubuntu.
What is interesting about Crunch Bang?
- It happened to be based on Ubuntu so you have access to repositories. And the forums, as well. But of course there might be things that won’t apply to Crunch Bang because it is not an official fork of Ubuntu. At least you’ve got access to more applications.
- The Crunch Bang site also claims that you should be able to play various kinds of media right away. That includes mp3s, DVDs and Flash videos. This is something a lot of users might be wondering about because not all distros support these media due to legal issues related to the proprietary formats.
- Lightweight apps by default. It uses some lightweight apps by default which makes it feel faster than your regular Ubuntu install. For one thing it does not use the GNOME desktop environment by default, nor is it using KDE. It uses Openbox as a window manager and if you’re wondering if it has a file manager, there’s the nifty PCManFM.
- You might miss OpenOffice.org but you’ve got Gnumeric and Abiword. However, if you have to make presentations, looks like you’ve got no other choice but to install OOo anyway.
- Crunch Bang has a Lite edition and an Asus EEE edition. I think that the main difference lies in the applications each of them has by default. CrunchBang Lite seems to have a lot of command line interface apps such as irssi and newsbeuter. The ones in the EEE edition are graphical.
I might download the EEE edition just to see if it would be alright on my Aspire One. Why not, right?
Have you tried Xubuntu? It’s also a lightweight version of Ubuntu and its official. Although not as light as OpenBox, XFCE has a good balance of speed and appearance. I also heard of Ubuntu for netbooks called Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Looks nice.
I’m also a pinoy Ubunturero.
I am using XUBUNTU 8.10 in a very old Sony VAIO PCGN505 laptop (Celeron 300MHz, 128MB of RAM, 9 years old) and it works good but sometimes it feels sluggish specially when I have multiple tabs in Firefox, it uses all the memory plus the Swap file is maxed out. I think that XUBUNTU still loads a lot of unnecessary things. I will give CrunchBang a try, specially since this laptop is mostly for travel, all I need is internet access, maybe listen to music and an occasional video. This machine came with W98 and two years ago it barely ran with it, so I decided to try XUbuntu and it gave this computer a new life. I even started with the full Ubuntu v6 and amazingly it ran, slow but ran.
Crunchbang is superior to me to Xubuntu because, like Giancarlo says, Xubuntu has a lot of bloat, #! has none (or very little). I’ve tried numerous distros, and bar Arch Linux, Crunchbang is by far the fastest. Added to that it’s ability to draw upon the Ubuntu repositories you’re onto a winner.
I still prefer Arch but it’s not necessarily suitable for someone with limited time to tinker, or without the necessary skills or knowledge to configure it.
Cheers,
Ed