Episode: 265
Title: HPR0265: CrunchBang Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0265/hpr0265.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:04:34

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Can I start a conversation with you?
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio on Monster B and I'm 330.
And tonight we're going to talk about CrunchBang Linux.
CrunchBang Linux is based on Ubuntu, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
But you're running it now on several systems?
Yeah, I've got it running on my desktop and they have a specialized triple levers and called Crunchy.
Oh, really?
It's official now?
Yeah.
Well, both of them are as official as they're going to get.
They promise to break your system.
That's why it's called CrunchBang.
But it's been extremely stable for me.
Well, that's cool.
I mean, how much more different is it to Ubuntu?
It's just kind of like a remix or it's totally different.
Kind of like how Linux meant is to Ubuntu, right?
Well, it's more like the difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu.
Because it's just Ubuntu with open box on top of it with all the GTK apps.
Instead of using like open office and some of the bigger apps, they've got like clause mail and Abbeyword and G-PickView.
But they also added some other stuff in like Ghibr and Terminator, which we'll talk about later, is the default terminal emulator.
And for those that haven't heard my episode on Ghibr, it's an all in one app for dig and all kinds of other web 2.0 social media type things.
That sounds pretty cool.
So it's a lightweight distribution then.
Yeah, and it's not like it's not so lightweight that it's odd to use.
Like sometimes you get a like a flux box system that you really have to, you know, it's a base and you build on it.
This is ready to go.
Like in I had to change a couple of things because I'm a free software Nazi.
It comes with Skype by default.
You know, every install has Skype.
So I pulled that out and it already comes with flash and a lot of the media Ubuntu codex, which I'm still fishing through to get some of the ones out that aren't actually free software.
I don't really care about breaking US law.
I'm worried about software freedom.
But it does come with everything you need.
You know, flash is already done.
All the codex, everything.
You just sit down and it works.
And I see they included Skype too.
Yeah, and Conkey.
Okay.
Yeah, Conkey is part of the regular under the BSD license, right?
I haven't looked actually.
I think it is, but it in Skype is not free.
So pretty much it's kind of like in the class of Linux Mint.
Yeah, it is.
Kind of borderline.
Is it legal or not?
Well, it's, yeah.
And it comes from the UK.
So they have different laws than we do here in US.
But it would be really easy to cut a couple of things out of it and make it completely legal for your area.
Like you said before, you know, it's based on Ubuntu.
So it's 100% compatible with it.
So it's using the same repositories.
Is it using any like a different repository?
Not that I've noticed.
It's pretty much the Ubuntu repos as they come.
Well, one good thing.
It's kind of making open box popular, you know?
Yeah.
And it makes open box really easy to use.
There are actually GUI config tools in your, let me bring it up here.
So that's all custom.
Yeah, it's, they've got a, let's see, they've got a GUI menu editor and a GUI config tool, which are really nice.
And they also have links to the actual RC XML files so that you could go in.
You know, if you're a big time open box person, you can go in and hack it yourself.
But the, you know, me not knowing what I'm doing at all, it does have some really nice GUI tools.
Well, one cool thing is, I mean, it introduced you that open box.
So yeah, I'd never used open box before.
Yeah, so that's pretty cool.
So I mean, later on, if you want to try something else and you still want to stick with open box,
at least it gives you kind of an idea of what to do.
And one cool thing about open boxes, once you have a configuration, you can pretty much just move it to another distra.
So once I, you know, get this all hacked the way I'd like it, I should, in theory, just be able to move it over to a regular Debian install or arch or Slackware or Fedora or whatever.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's probably a hidden configuration file.
And even if you can't move it over, you have pretty much the basics too well.
Yeah.
Use it as a template.
I know that, you know, not all of these packages are brand new or people haven't heard about them.
But I've been playing with the BitTorrent client called Deloosh.
And for people that are absolutely terrified of getting in trouble for downloading things over BitTorrent,
it's got some really cool features in it that, like, you can pull in blocklists.
So like, it's like a huge blacklist of IP addresses that it won't get files from because, you know, it's known to be, you know, the MPA or the RIA or, you know, the French government.
Yeah, it's just, it's kind of taking a bunch of blacklists that are around the internet and compiling all of them into one.
And it's been really cool.
And there's a thing that you can set so that anytime you minimize it to the tray, you have to put in a password to get it to open up again.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, it might not be incredibly useful for everyone, but I'm kind of 10-foil security nut job.
So I thought it was pretty cool.
No, you said it had the, you're talking it, it blocks like bad IP addresses.
Yeah.
Okay.
I see, it also says it has like a BitTorrent protocol encryption.
Yeah.
I wonder if that's just from, would that be just from, like, from my house to your house?
Um, actually, I think it's encryption from the peer.
Well, to the tracker from the peer and you.
So I think each jump is encrypted.
Oh, okay.
Because there are a lot of ISPs that do traffic shaping.
And if you encrypt it, it's just an SSL connection.
They have no idea what it is.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Yeah.
There, there are a lot of plugins for it that let you, like, you know, fake your, your share ratio.
Yeah, because some trackers, if you share more, you download quicker.
You can just lie and say that you're sharing all kinds of stuff and they'll let you download as quick as possible.
Um, you can download stuff, you can download from Torrent sites that have RSS feeds.
It's like if you, if you had some recurring thing, I'm not going to give any type of possibilities,
but some recurring thing that, you know, had an RSS feed with Torrents in it.
It would just download them automatically like a, like a pod catcher.
Okay.
That's pretty cool.
I've seen the RSS.
So that's what that's for.
Yeah.
That part.
Well, what else is in there that you notice is different from Ubuntu?
Is there any new programs you might have added?
Um, are there other than the, the stuff that comes because it's a cut down version.
You're like clause mail I've never used.
Um, it does come with life theory as the, the RSS feed reader.
It comes with that by default, which Ubuntu doesn't.
Um, has GFTP, you know, the, the GNOME FTP client.
Um, it ships with Pigeon just like Ubuntu does.
Uh, it's got a lot of, um, things for graphics.
It already comes with ink scape.
It comes with this weird color picker, like the one that's in the gimp.
But it's just a standalone app.
Um, a palette designer.
Some font stuff.
Um, to replace all of open office, they've got Abbey Word, GNU Merrick.
Um, they really don't have a thing for presentations, but there is a package out there.
I just don't remember what it's called.
Um, sound in video.
It, it uses the defaults, totem and rhythm box.
But it comes with audacity, pit of e, Kino.
Uh, what else is different in here?
Uh, win FF video encoder.
A bunch of other stuff I added myself like jacosher.
And it's, that's pretty much all that's really changed.
It has a lot of the GNOME apps.
And actually a lot of X, X, S, C, E apps too.
But that's just to make it a little more lightweight.
But it's all, it's all GTK.
Yeah, that's cool.
Now what about the file manager?
What is it?
Is it a novelist?
It uses Thunar.
Oh.
Which has been one of the only pains that I've had.
It was because I was a huge Dropbox fan.
And there's not a plugin for Thunar.
And to install Nodless, there's like 80 some dependencies.
And some look like they would conflict with something.
I don't know.
If someone knows that you can just drop it in there,
I would be glad to find that out because I miss Nodless.
Or not Nodless itself, but I miss Dropbox so much.
Yeah, I've never, never tried Dropbox.
It's really just a piece of mind thing, knowing that you can drop something into a folder.
And it's stored on the internet as fast as it can get there.
Yeah, there'd be no way to really run Nodless
inside of OpenBox, right?
I mean, without it.
I'm not sure because OpenBox being a window manager,
not a desktop environment,
one of the dependencies for Nodless is Matacity,
which is a window manager.
So I was kind of afraid of installing it
because if you have two window managers running at the same time,
it can...
It just doesn't sound like a good idea, right?
Okay, yeah.
It was kind of like,
because I run FluxBox.
And I fired up Nodless one time.
And it pretty much turned my FluxBox into a...
a GNOME desktop.
Ooh, it replaced all my menus.
And I forgot what I had to type in to get rid of it.
I think Peter 64 was in the chairroom at the time,
because he said it happened to him.
But yeah, I wouldn't try it then.
Okay.
Say it.
How do you unmount...
Like when you plug into USB devices,
it just auto-mounts just like in Ubuntu.
It just shows right up through our opens.
You can right-click on it in the...
through our is set up to look like Nodless.
Out in this.
I don't know if that's a default thing or not.
But you just right-click on it in there and tell it to unmount.
It unmounts.
Like they really made this as easy as humanly possible.
Well, that is easy then.
Yeah.
I still have some weird things I'm working out.
I run X on my server.
And I was using SSH-X to open up a program on my...
on my crunch bank system here.
I pulled the desktop picture over.
So I have my server's wallpaper on my desktop.
Over top of the wallpaper I'm supposed to have.
But just kind of...
It's really weird.
And I don't really understand how it happened.
But it's a cool wallpaper, so I'm not complaining too much.
Are you going to take a screenshot of that?
I actually have a screenshot up on UnixPorn.com.
But yeah, I can...
I'll figure out a way to take a picture of both my server and my desktop at the same time and show that...
Yeah, it's the same thing.
Yeah, I'll go ahead and put the link to the UnixPorn screenshot in the show notes.
Yeah, check it out.
I've got one up there with my conkey config and Terminator running and all that.
No, now to the...
Now, he replaced the Gnome Terminal or...
Well, the default terminal is Terminator.
Yeah.
The Terminator is a...
It's an end Python.
And at least in Ubuntu and Debian,
it's basically a Gnome term that you can split into smaller Gnome terms inside of itself.
And the way you would configure it in Ubuntu or Debian was to configure Gnome Term
and then your changes would automatically switch over.
So if you wanted it to be transparent or whatever,
I haven't figured out how to do it in CrunchBang yet,
but by default Terminator is right there in front of you.
So you can open up one terminal window and split it as many times as you want.
Right now, I currently have two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different slices
of varying sizes, but it's all inside of one window.
So I don't have a bunch of stuff open underneath.
All right, it's pretty cool.
I don't know if I told you the other day.
I think we were looking at how to switch between slices with keyboard without using the mouse,
because I got Peter64 to install this and he likes it too.
But he asked me,
well, how do you switch from, you know, slice to slice without using the mouse?
And I'm like, I have no idea.
I looked all over the documentation for it.
So he started messing around the keys and hit the right one.
You hold down the control and use the tab key,
and you can switch between slices.
Oh, that's nice.
I'm sure this makes great radio, but yeah, that's nice.
And if you hit, what is it, the F?
I think it's, let me try it out here.
F11 goes full screen.
Yeah, so it ends up looking like rat poison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so much you can do with this though.
I mean, just with that little menu that you right-click on the desk or in the terminal window,
I mean, you could turn off the title bar, scroll bar.
You can open up tabs, and you can also zoom.
Yeah, the zoom feature is nice, because it lets you go into just one of the terminals
and not have to look at all the other ones.
That makes the text wicked huge.
But yeah, if there was something going on in one of them,
I mean, that's really what you wanted to see right then.
Instead of closing all the other ones, you can just zoom right into it.
Okay, do you have a GNOME terminal installed?
No.
Because I went ahead and installed it in mine.
Just so I could, you know, use all the, like, transparency,
you know, change the fonts, listen to that.
You know, so that way it takes effect in Terminator.
I went ahead and installed that there was only, like, four or five dependencies.
So it's really, it's not going to pull down the whole entire GNOME desktop just to install.
Yeah.
But like on my triple E, I have a KDE installed with no GNOME apps at all.
And I put Terminator on there and it used X-Term, you know, for the default theme.
So then if you change your X-Term theme, does it change your Terminator theme?
Yes.
Awesome.
But there's not a lot you can really do with X-Term besides changing colors.
Yeah.
Let's say in CrunchBang, by default, it's a black background with white text.
Because everything else that's themed is with a dark theme.
You're not quite black, but that kind of, kind of matte gray color.
Yeah, that's how I have mindset up now.
I'm not running CrunchBang.
I'm, you know, running Debian.
But that's how I set my color theme up.
Well, before we end this, one more question for you.
How easy is it to see it?
Let's say I haven't really played with the themes too much,
but it comes with a bunch of default ones in the, I don't know if I can find it here.
The GUI config tool for OpenBox.
There's a bunch of default themes.
And I'm assuming that you could just see, yeah, there's a button to add a new theme.
You just click it and you'd have to have a .obt file, which is a OpenBox theme archive.
But yeah, you just, you know, pull the whole thing down.
You could get a whole bunch of them off of a boxlook.org, I think it is.
Yeah, and you could just drop it right in there and go switching away.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, I like that side.
I use that one for a FluxBox too.
Yeah, they've done everything they could to make this as easy as possible.
My girlfriend's running it.
Yeah, she's, you know, the only Linux she's ever really run.
For any length of time is regular vanilla Ubuntu.
And she took right to it.
She was like, you know, where's the buttons?
And I'm like, oh, it's all in the right click menu.
She was like, all right, cool.
Yeah, she didn't need to install anything to get flash or anything like that working.
So she was pretty happy.
And it probably runs a lot faster.
Oh, it's quick.
Like if you want to save old hardware, this is definitely one of the ways to go.
Like I probably gain, what, at least 50 to 75 megabytes of RAM.
Oh, yeah.
Like right now I have three Firefox Windows open.
And I'm only using 380 Mixer RAM.
And that's with Webber and Deluge and Terminator with eight Windows split up in it.
I mean, it's...
You can really put this thing through some...
some gruesome tests if you wanted to.
I think it's just a cool...
Say in one Firefox, when do I have over 10 tabs open?
Because after this we're going to do Linux.
We're going to do Linux cranks, but...
Right.
Yeah, that's right there is where all your memory went.
Yeah, but I mean...
And I only have 502 Megs, but it's still just snappy as it could ever be.
Like this thing, it's just amazing.
I've never played with a lightweight desktop like this.
You know, without having to try to do a whole bunch of configuration from a very default kind of thing, this is nice.
Well, you highly recommend it then, right?
Yes, yes.
All right.
At least until it, yeah, until it crashes like they promise it will,
and that I'm sure I'll be squalling on the IRC or something.
But, yeah, as it is now, I'm really enjoying it.
Yeah, because I've seen it on just for a watch once.
I think when it first came out, they posted it.
I've seen it, didn't think nothing of it.
I heard the...
Linux outlaws talk about it.
I heard you talk about it.
If it wasn't for you guys, I would never even have known about it.
Yeah, I know I've seen it on DistroWatch.
It's just, oh well, another bunch of re-makes.
Yeah.
So they've put some serious work into this.
And there are some people that are complaining about how it's not a distro.
It's just a respin and all that.
But they've put, you know, distro type work into it.
I mean, it's more than just a pretty theme.
There's some definite, you know, actual engineering behind it.
So everyone, listen, go check it out.
What's the web address?
It is crunchbanglinics.org.
And what's the deal with the symbols they're using?
The hash sign and the exclamation point?
Yeah, it's just because typing crunchbang gets really, really repetitive.
Well, you got anything else to add?
Not that I can think of.
All right, man.
Thanks for talking with me today.
And I'll see you in five minutes for Linux ranks.
Yep.
See you then.
All right, man.
Bye.
Later on.
Thanks.
Oops, I have a correction.
There are four entries in the source.list file.
And they are linked to launch pad.
So there are extra repositories.
All right.
Thanks for listening to Hecker Public Radio and good night.
Thank you for listening to Hecker Public Radio.
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