#! Crunchbang Wallpaper
Here’s my latest Crunchbang Linux wallpaper. I wanted to stay true to the mostly black default theme as well as ensuring there’s good space on the right side of a lengthy Conky configuration. The file can be downloaded from the #!Crunchbang wiki site.
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I don’t hide the fact that I’m a distromaniac. I have many HDDs and partitions waiting for a new *nix install. I stay glued to distrowatch.com. And I have developed a number of tricks and shortcuts to to get any fresh distro install up to speed with my apps and configurations asap.
Over the past several months I have stuck to using Mint, Sabayon and Zenwalk. I’ve been tricking out my XCFE and Gnome window managers with 3D effects, the Avant Window Navigator – a flashy application launcher reminiscent of iMac, wobbly windows, and the rest of the bells and whistles. It was looking so whiz bang my wife asked me to install Linux on her computer!
Just last week, during one of my frequent passes through distrowatch.com, I discovered #!Crunchbang Linux. Crunchbang is an Ubuntu derivative that uses the Openbox window manager exclusively.
Openbox’s menu system has a method for using dynamic menus. This is done by accepting the output of a script and using that output as the source for a menu. Each time the user points the mouse at the sub-menu, the script is re-run and the menu is regenerated. This capability allows users and software developers more flexibility than the standard static menus found in most other window managers. For instance, two developers wrote a script in Python that lists a user’s new Gmail messages in a sub-menu. Openbox is light weight and does not impose a massive toll on the CPU. Upon install (standard Ubuntu install engine) I was immediately struck by the zen-like simpleness.
The desktop was uncluttered save for Conky, a system monitor that is drawn onto the desktop. Conky is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious), and much more. Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources when configured. I spent a evening learning, configuring and playing with Conky. The forum on the Crunchbang site was very helpful and provided other users Conky config files and many many examples.
So, I’m a week into my Crunchbang install and have not flipped over to one of my other distros. I really enjoy the simplicity, speed and unique linux feel to Openbox not to mention that everything just works and it pulls deb/ubuntu repositories.
crunchbang linux desktop
This is my Crunchbang desktop and it’s running Abiword, GIMP, PCMan file manager, GPictview image viewer and a terminal open. You can see where I have right clicked the desktop to access the application menu and have navigated down to the internet submenu.
Conky is displaying time, date, system info, MEM and CPU usage, top 5 processes, ethernet inbound and outbound traffic, current Melbourne weather details, my Gmail inbox and a few choice keyboard shortcuts.
I’d highly recommend this little distro to all. Looks like I’ll be staying faithful to Crunchbang … at least for a little while!
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