Crunchbang Statler Review

"A few Years ago, I was given an old amd 800mghz machine which was deemed to "slow" to run xp with service pack 3. I tried a few distro's on it and had settled with Wolvix. But shortly after that, a new distro with a weird name,"#! crunchbang", was introduced on distrowatch. This distro touted an unknown (to me) environment called Openbox. Openbox was supposed to be a lightweight system, and was based on Ubuntu -which i had used before. Like many others, I downloaded it sometime in Nov 2008. After about 10 minutes playing with the live CD, I just had to install it. Shortly thereafter I had this #! OS installed, with it's plain interface and dark theme, but it ran beautifully! It was quick on my old machine, and everything "just worked!I remember finding a friendly Forum there, One that turned out to be one of the greatest community forums I have ever been a part of. I still remember My first post on the #! forums, nothing I installed would appear on the menu. I knew that this must be a problem, somehow overlooked by the developer, So I posted my concerns. I was answered by corenominal (AKA Phillip Newborough) himself. He explained to me how to enter new menu items by hand. Being answered by the developer himself, showed me from the start, just how special this Distro was. During the course of the next year, I leaned from him and many others, on that forum, what I now realize has totally destroyed my happy-go-lucky computer life, and started me down the road of endless tweaking and hacking of any system I use… thanks Guys!

"Skip forward a few years – my computers are now all multi-core machines now, and I have no need of a lightweight system, yet here I see #! on distrowatch, with a new release, but now based on Debian squeeze, still in the top 20 at distrowatch, and still making news. So I just had to download and install it on my trusty test machine, (a P4 Toshiba laptop with 1 gig memory.) and find out just what changes have been made to one of my all time favorite distro's."

Complete Story

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