Digital Medication

Looks like I found my new favorite LiveCD. Now normally I only review security distros here, but I have to make an exception for CrunchBang. It is quite possibly the best Ubuntu hack I’ve seen since Mint.

[Gentoo users can stop reading now]

The balance of performance, stability, usability and overall “leetness” of CrunchBang is unparalleled by any currently active distribution. Now mind you, I tend to toss those words around for any distro that has the words Openbox and Debian/Ubuntu in its description. Speaking of which…

Description:

CrunchBang Linux is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customized from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality.

CrunchBang Lite comes with these core applications:

Run Program → gmrun
Terminal → Terminator Terminal Emulator
Web Browser → Firefox 3 web browser
File Manager → PCMan File Manager
Media Player → VLC media player
Text Editor → Leafpad

And the following terminal applications:

Vim editor
Midnight Commander file manager
rtorrent BitTorrent Client
MOC music player
Newsbeuter feed reader
elinks web browser
MUTT email client
irssi IRC client
naim chat client
htop system monitor

Screenshots (in no particular order, thanks to Wordpress):

Gripes:
You’ll notice a screenshot of the autostart file, which seemed to be the only place to get rid of the default UK keyboard layout. Unfortunately, 5am Linuxing prevented me from being able to figure out how to make the settings stick…

CrunchBang Linux is also available in Standard and Eee PC editions.

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