Dazzling Debian-based distro

Customize CrunchBang

The CrunchBang forums [10] provide a wealth of information, including a wide variety of community-provided suggestions for personalizing your system with an artesian depth of desktop screen images and other tweaks to make your system your own (Figure 3).

Figure 3: There are many options to put backgrounds onto your Openbox environment, such as this photo of Mount Shasta in Northern California by CrunchBang contributor "rstrcogburn."

With the lightness of the window manager, CrunchBang works on a wide range of hardware, and for older machines, the distro seems to be an adequate replacement distro for those with limited memory or outdated processors. In other words, while CrunchBang works well on older hardware, on newer machines with large amounts of memory and multiple processors, the distro soars.

CrunchBang Grows Up

CrunchBang is the brainchild of British software developer Philip Newborough, whose hobby has grown into a distro that regularly stays ranked in the top 50 on DistroWatch.com. Originally, Newborough based the distro on Ubuntu, but in 2010 he switched the distro base to Debian for both practical and philosophical reasons.

CrunchBang 10, named Statler, and the upcoming CrunchBang 11, which is code-named Waldorf, are now based on Debian. Because it is a Debian-based distro, CrunchBang releases are tied to the Debian release cycle [11].

The naming convention for CrunchBang mirrors Debian's method, but rather than using Toy Story characters (as Debian does), CrunchBang uses a character from The Muppet Show with the same first letter as the Debian release. Hence, CrunchBang's Statler is named for Debian's Squeeze, and the upcoming Debian Wheezy release gets CrunchBang's Waldorf. (For those of you who aren't familiar with The Muppet Show , Statler and Waldorf are the two old guys in the balcony who often heckle the performers on-stage [12]).

One thing that draws people to CrunchBang is its community, which is particularly reflected in the knowledgeable and helpful nature of the forum. For example, in addition to offering tips for customizing CrunchBang, the forum provides a considerable number of answered questions and in-depth discussions on programs native to CrunchBang, such as Thunar and Conky (Figure 4). In fact, many of the contributors to this forum are specialists in these applications.

Figure 4: My desktop is modified to have four desktops instead of the default two desktops, and I've colored by Conky readings to make them more readable on the screen.