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Comment by figital | Hacker News Reader

Crunchbang ditched the Ubuntu layer about a year ago and is now just on top of Debian using Openbox.

Have you use/are you using CrunchBang? If yes, would you mind to share your experience? I'm looking for a minimalist Linux that can boot to console by default but comes with Xorg pre-installed with one command away to invoke some sort of Windows Manager in case I want to browse using Chrome.

I really dig it and have been running the same install since May 2010 as my primary workstation (I even run #! in an emulator now on my MacBookPro instead of OSX :)). Obviously the file system is like Debian but the installation process (including a minimalistic-yet-stylish OpenBox desktop config) has been simplified.

Recent (and rare) release a few weeks ago (most updates are just pushed through distro-upgrade commands) : http://crunchbanglinux.org/blog/2011/11/27/crunchbang-10-sta...

The prerogative over time seems to be continued experiments in the art of minimalism and simplicity. I like that (I love that).

By default a gdm/gui/login kicks in at bootup ... I always kill that ASAP so I can "startx" or somesuch manually.

It's worth your time to try it! (You'd hear more about it but it's 100% word-of-mouth)

Sure: if I didn't have a 9-5 job I'd build everything myself on top of Arch or Debian ... I don't have the time and #! fills in the gaps for me.

And the way to kill gdm/gui/login is by... Ctrl+Alt+Backspace kind of trickery?

Will definitely give it a try!

Nice! One super-easy way is to "sudo rcconf" and then just deselect gdm (and anything else you don't need).

Just to chime in here but I've been using Crunchbang lately too and find it a nice choice. I've wanted something stable and lighter that I use as my "desktop/host" and then do all my dev work in Virtualbox or KVM vms.

FYI, the latest ISO now uses SLim instead of GDM.

Thanks for sharing about rcconf. I'd never heard of that Debian tool before.

By the way, is your emulator VirtualBox by any chance? If so, is there any extra work to get the Linux into full-screen (aside from having to install VirtualBox Guest Tools)?

I've been using Parallels for Mac (last year's version). If you just bump up the video RAM to like 8MB you'll get more options for display sizes. I'll upgrade to version 7 ... just haven't had the time lately.

Crunchbang is probably a good choice, but if you want to be really minimal

1) Install debian, but don't choose to install the desktop environment 2) Install the programs you want, e.g. 'sudo apt-get install xorg openbox chromium' 3) When you want to browse the web, run 'startx'

I've switched to running my personal laptop and work desktop this way. Granted I'm not a typical user, but it's surprised me how much of the modern linux desktop I can strip away and still have a pleasant experience.

NICE!. Thank you very very much for the info! I'm looking for something similar to this setup (and expand as you go).

Check out Tiny Core (http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html). It's a full X desktop in 10 MB. You can install it to the hard disk and use their rather decent package manager to grab more applications. Very convenient to keep on a USB stick as well, because it leaves you plenty of space for storing data!

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