#!

[liam_on_linux]

lostcarpark told me a while ago that he'd found a Linux distro that he was happy with on his netbook. It was Crunchbang or #! to its friends.

So I've taken the plunge and nuked Ubuntu clean off my laptop - which is a few years old, even though I only bought it a year ago, and thus is no powerhouse - and bunged #! on instead.

It's a slightly intimating new world that feels rather like an old one from a decade and a half ago. Gone are the pleasures of Gnome and right-clicking on stuff to modify its settings. Whereas some familiar tools are still there, like Firefox and whatnot, OpenOffice has gone, and it's taken hours of fiddling to find a panel that I can live with. The default tint2 is a bit too minimal for me and when I tried to put it up the right-hand edge of my screen - a old-fashioned matter of editing the config file and restarting it - it actually displayed on the left, while shunting apps over to leave a gap at the right. Hmmm.

Next I tried lxpanel then bmpanel and finally I've settled on fbpanel which has the all-important-to-me autohide functionality. On my Thinkpad's 1024x768 screen, I don't want to waste space on a permanent panel. I never knew there were so many to choose from!

Then it was a bit of hacking at its config file to banish the menu and quicklaunch icons - as #! has its own methods for this, and I don't want to bother duplicating stuff - and then editing Openbox's menus to replace references to tint2 with fbpanel. This is after I'd tweaked Openbox's autorun script to launch fbpanel instead of tint2 instead of lxpanel instead of tint2.

Then install Firefox 3.5 and Chromium and edit the menus to distinguish between those.

Now, since my trusty IBM has no Windows key, I have to remap something else in its place for all #!'s keyboard shortcuts to work.

After disabling DRI in X.org, it's fairly quick, I'll give it that.

I'll give it a few weeks and see how I get on. If it bogs down, I might decamp to actual Debian.

But somehow it all seems terribly 1996...