Episode: 873
Title: HPR0873: Philip and Rebecca Newborough of CrunchBang
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0873/hpr0873.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:53:26

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Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ken Fallon and I'm here at Aug Camp 11, standing
outside in the cafe, people on a Sunday and I'm here with Philip and Becky, who you might
know as, what's your handle?
Corn almanoe.
Corn almanoe.
And you might know them, who play online as the inventors of crunch-bang linux, would
that be correct?
Yes.
So take us back, take us back to the start when you decided one morning that you wanted
to develop a linux distra.
Well, see, this is where I fail, I'm rubbish at speaking about these.
Well, I got out of bed, I had some breakfast, I don't know.
No, well.
No problem, let's go back further, when did you get into linux, when did you get into,
when was your first computer?
My first computer, okay, that was probably a Commodore 16, or a Commodore, yeah, Commodore
16, so yeah.
And then I progressed from that to Commodore 64, then I didn't use computers, I didn't
touch computers until rarely, and all through school or college, but when I came out of
college I got interested in computing and purchased a PC from, you know, High Street Retailer
down the street, you know, just down the High Street, it was a very early 486 DX2, maybe,
something like that if I remember right, so probably had about a mega ram in it, and,
yeah, I bought that for playing X-Wing, which was a brilliant game, X-Wing, and then TIE Fighter,
because the big Star Wars found, yeah, and then progressed from playing games, which
I don't play games at all anymore, unfortunately, to just dabbling with a bit of web design
and stuff, that was very early, that was on Windows, and then I picked up a job working
in doing web design professionally, and found that I was using linux more and more on
the server, and I think it was just a natural progression going from the server to the desktop,
so, and now I'll just use the next full time, too.
Okay, and I kind of know the story of a behind-crunch bank, so you're scratching your own
niche, or was it some other need that you wanted to do your own district?
Yeah, I know very much scratching my own niche, it's, at the time, I was using Ubuntu,
but with open box instead of the default no installation, and I've got a fair number
of computers, probably like a lot of geeks and stuff, so I decided it might be fun just to
try and build an ISO image so that I could put crunch bank, or want even name crunch
bank, then it was just so I could put the same set up on all my systems, really quite easily,
and yeah, that's how I started.
And was it your personal preference?
Had you gone through GNOME, had you gone to Kitty, what made you select the window manager?
Can you tell everybody what the crunch bank is essentially?
Well, crunch bank is just a rip-off of, it's a rip-off of what I was a rip-off of Ubuntu,
but just with open box as a window manager on top, and then,
well, open box is all XFCE, so I'm not, well, at the moment I'm preferring XFCE,
but it was just set up a lot differently to the default Ubuntu distribution at the time,
so whereas Ubuntu would chip with quite a lot of pre-installed software,
the idea behind crunch bank that it would maybe not have as much software on it,
and you could just select what you wanted after you'd done the install.
I like the, I'm running out of the home, obviously.
Obviously, I don't work, it's cool, one big terminal window.
Where did you get all the artwork and design from?
Most of the artwork is contributed through the community, through the forums and stuff like that,
so the actual artwork, the shifts with, I don't mean you really call it artwork, could you?
Yes.
Right.
What are we talking about, like the wallpapers?
Yeah, wallpapers, the look and feel, how the windows are all tall, the black, the white,
the hatch sound. Where did the crunch bank come from, by the way?
Ah, well, the crunch bank, it's a, again, a bit of a rip-off of the Shabang,
obviously, with, well, crunch bank was the name that I chose for my personal domain,
for my blog and stuff, and I didn't really have a name to call, you know, a Linux distribution,
if you can call it that, so it just became crunch bank, you know, Linux.
Sorry, so I mean, developers are working on crunch bank at any given time?
Well, you got all the devian developers at the moment, as it's now based on devian,
so thank you to all the devian developers, and me.
Oh, and, well, that's, yeah, it's not really, we don't really have any shared repositories
or anything that people can, you know, contribute to, but the main idea behind crunch bank is
somebody will run it, and then if they want to contribute a script or something like,
you know, a menu item or something, they can just include it, they can post it on the forums
and it will get included. I think we've got a chap called John Raff on the forums,
who's contributed a pipe menu for open box, so now you, that will navigate your file system
just for the open box menu, so that's the stuff like that, you know, you can post it in a forum post
because it's just a script basically, and, you know, if people like it and vote it up,
they'll get included. Okay, fantastic. I think you're kind of unique,
unique as a small distro to have a dedicated community manager,
so I'll talk to the community manager here, how are you doing?
I'm fine, thank you, how are you?
Can you tell me how you got involved in the project?
I married the lead developer.
I think that's really showing your commitment to the open source philosophy.
Yes, definitely. No, I do everything to support Philip and, you know,
and the project, let's say community manager, I go on to the forums,
we'll create the forums, we've got an excellent forum community,
it's like when you said about who are the developers,
and Philip quite rightly has said, you know, the Debian developers,
but equally, the community, they contribute, even with just the ideas,
you know, as in what packages the next relationship with,
they will give us ideas.
I think in the greater broadcasting community,
the crunch bank forums are well known for the friendliness,
and the speed of reply to any of the polls.
How much time a week do you dedicate to crunch bank?
For me, daily, I go on there every evening, you know,
checking for welcomes, introductions, you know,
just general housekeeping around the site and that,
and same for you, really, isn't it?
It's with us daily.
Yeah, I'm not dedicating as much time as I should do at the moment,
so I apologize to everybody.
Okay, that's cool.
Anything else you want to add? What's coming in the future?
What's coming down the pike?
Well, at the moment, I'm working on,
well, the current release, the stable release called Staller,
that's based on the Debian squeeze.
I've been working on a point release.
It's probably, I might upset a few people,
because it'd probably be only XFCE, mainly because, you know,
I've got, yeah, that's quite exclusive, I suppose.
I don't know, I'm told anybody.
So mainly because I don't want to get lynched.
But the, well, the thing is,
open box remains the most popular of the two versions,
because we have an open box in the XFCE version.
But the problem is, I mean, I'm not,
I'm not used, you keep pushing that microphone,
it's closer and I keep moving away.
I've not used open box consecutively.
Well, I'm not used it really properly for maybe
the six months to a year.
I've been using, well, I've been, I'm actually,
don't tell anybody this.
Oh, no, you're sick of safe with us.
Well, my works machine at the moment is running
Ubuntu Natty and Unity, because I installed it just as,
you know, have a look, see what they're doing.
I quite liked it and it's stayed on there.
But I mean, I've had enough of it now and I'm moving back to,
well, I've installed statler with the XFCE version.
And I'm actually working on putting out a point release,
which is going to tidy that up and just include some
nice, hopefully some nice little features
that we're missing in the XFCE version,
which were previously in the open box version.
Okay, I guess this is such a personal project to you.
What, what do you do if you decide, okay,
I don't want to do this anymore.
I'm tired of this.
Do you feel like this is becoming a ball and chain
around your restriction, your use of other software?
No, not so much a ball and chain.
I mean, the thing is, I'm going to use it anyway.
So, but I do find that I work quite intensively
for, say, six months and then I'll take a break.
So, you know, just to try and avoid, well,
burnout, I suppose, you could call it.
Anything else?
No, that's fine.
Listen, thanks very much for the interview and thanks.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
So, a big shout out to OMS and Anonymous
and all the other forum moderators and stuff on the forums.
You guys are great and, you know,
the forums really wouldn't exist without them, wouldn't they?
No, so huge thank you for me as well to the guys.
Fantastic, and thank you for me.
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