CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

33 Responses to “CrunchBang Linux 8.10.01 — Testing”

1. GrzegorzJZD wrote, Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

   VLC must stay :D It is the only one linux player which can actually play movies with txt subtitles in non-english languages without any problems.

   Also OpenOffice.org should stay, but in version 3.

2. Philip wrote, Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

   @GrzegorzJZD: Your comments have been noted. However, packages can be quite easily installed, feedback on usage would be more beneficial. For example, on the mailing list, it has been identified that it might be better to start the power manager automatically, as opposed to leaving it as a user preference/option. Sometimes it is the little things that matter :)

3. Makosol wrote, Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

   By the way, VLC has never been a GTK app, but a wxWidget one…

4. Philip wrote, Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

   @Makosol: Thanks, but I was aware of that. For clarity, maybe I should have said, VLC is now a Qt4 app?

5. flick wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

   Just ran the newest testing version in livecd mode, and this is brilliant. Only quirk I found : the @ and the " symbols were flipflopped as I typed : if I hit the key for @ I produced a " and vice versa. I'm an American, using a standard HP dv6000 Pavilion laptop, regular qwerty keyboard. Not sure if this little weirdness only exists in livecd mode or if it would carry over to an HD install.

   I love the window manager, theme, the selection of included apps…really terrific.

6. Philip wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

   @flick: Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated. I am glad you mentioned this, I am from the UK and so that is the default keyboard selection. It can be changed to US by entering the command:

   setxkbmap us
   

   This can also be added to Openbox's autostart file so that the correct keyboard layout is set when you login. Maybe I should add a default value to the file with an appropriate comment explaining what it is for?! Or, if anyone has any suggestions on how best to handle this, I am all ears :)

7. flick wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

   @ Philip :

   I should have known it would be something simple like that. Thanks! I think the comment in the file would be sufficient. Are you planning any radical reworkings for the final release, or is installing the testing release and updating as I go along likely to get me the final release without bothering to wait? I am so insanely impressed by the minimalist UI of Crunchbang — I had no idea Openbox was this terrific, and matched up with Ubuntu, well, it's just good stuff. Thank you for sharing your ideas/design/excellent tinkering with Ubuntu.

8. Philip wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

   @flick: Thank you for your kind words :) Regarding any radical changes, no I do not think so, not unless somebody reports something horrendous. So far I have identified only minor tweaks. I will publish a list of changes when the final build is released.

9. flick wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

   @ Philip :

   I went ahead and installed it, working great. Nice work. Big projects like Ubuntu and small projects like Crunchbang are why I get such a kick out of using FOSS. Such a wealth of great software out there.

10. farker wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    I've been trying the testing for the past few hours and so far, so good! Didn't notice anything horrendous. Can't wait to try out the "lite" version! Good job Philip!

11. Philip wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    @farker: Good stuff :) Regarding the "lite" version, hopefully it will arrive sometime after the main release.

12. Robert Spencer wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    What's your beef with OpenOffice.org — CPU, RAM or hard-drive space?

    Mines hard-drive space, if I can found out how to safely remove the template resources (graphics and sound) that I never use and worse looks like something from the 80's, OOo would consume nearly half the space it does now.

    I've tried Abiword and Gnumeric in the past, liked them, but they didn't handle everything OOo could. Has that changed?

    Personally I only use OOo as a viewer, I'd love to find something much lighter and remove it.

13. Philip wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    @Robert Spencer: I do not really have any beef with OpenOffice.org, but I do find it overkill for my needs. I only ever occasionally use a word processor and when I do, it is normally for producing simple documents and proposals, which I tend to export as PDF. AbiWord does this just fine. I use spreadsheets even less.

14. Snowpine wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    The "beef" with OpenOffice is that it is much easier to install than to uninstall. I installed OO3 last night and it took about 5 minutes to set up (not counting download time of course). Whereas removing it would require tampering with the crunchbang-desktop metapackage…

15. Will wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    Great job Phillip. I've installed on the sd card in my eee1000 and only had minor problems. Because /home was used for 8.04.2 #!, and I forgot to comment out all the OpenBox and conky config files. Now I'll have to manually tweak them. My fault really.

    There seems to be a question about the difference between 8.04.2 and 8.10.1 and the eee pc's external video. 8.04.2 worked seamlessly as expected. 8.10.1 one external or laptop lcd will work, not both. Resolution setting is also a problem on external monitor. I can set the resolution but the fonts are huge and conky is in the middle of the desktop. These issues are likely related to the EEE or Ubuntu 8.10 buut I thought I'd report them.

    Otherwise I'll keep poking around.

16. Philip wrote, Thursday, November 20th, 2008

    @Will: Thanks for the feedback. I think I would agree with your hypothesis that the issues you experienced are likely related to the EEE and Ubuntu. I will look into them. Thanks again for reporting back :)

17. Chad wrote, Friday, November 21st, 2008

    Hey!

    Just installed 8.10.01 on my IBM Thinkpad T41 and everything works great except a small issue with the wireless. My integrated wireless card was recognized but the Password Type WAP is not an available choice, just WEP.

    Other than that, it's fast and working great!

    -Chad

18. Chad wrote, Friday, November 21st, 2008

    oops……the above message should have stated "WPA" and not "WAP". :)

19. Philip wrote, Friday, November 21st, 2008

    @Chad: Thank you for your feedback :) Sorry to hear you are having problems with your wifi, do you have the same issues with a regular Ubuntu 8.10 installation, or is it CrunchBang specific?

20. Chad McCullough wrote, Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

    Hi Philip,

    ahhhh……I'm actually running Ubuntu 8.04 on another hard drive for my laptop and it's working fine. Maybe I should try 8.10? The previous version of Crunchbang worked fine.

    Thanks!

21. IMQ wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    Hi Philip,

    What will happen to CrunchBang 8.04.x once CrunchBang 8.10 is finally released? Will you maintain updates for both or 8.04 will be dropped?

    Just curious. I am guessing, if I want to keep CrunchBang 8.04.x, I can still update packages that are non-CrunchBang related from Ubuntu repos until something breaks or the end of life for 8.04, whichever come first. :)

22. Philip wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    @IMQ: Yes, all being well, the CrunchBang 8.04.xx releases will continue to be supported until Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" reaches end of life.

23. GrzegorzJZD wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    Can You tell anything about future repository for CrunchBang? Will it have anything what we can't find in Ubuntu's repositories?

    I'd like to add a location in my Software Source to update/upgrade Ubuntu.

24. szamot83 wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    Hello, I have installed 8.10 on old laptop, and iI have added menu (this is not rmb blackbox menu, this looks like xfce menu) to my panel. Problem was, that when I choosed exit from this menu, error appeared "can not run….. "lxsession-logout (No such file or directory). So I have installed lxsession -lite, but this don't help. Now when I choose exit from menu nothing happening. I don't know how to dock there RMB blackbox menu. I don't know how to solve this problem. Exit from rmb menu works properly. Thanks for all your work.

25. Philip wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    @GrzegorzJZD: Sorry, I do not have any crystal balls :) Having said that, chances are the repositories will contain at least some packages that are not available from Ubuntu's. Run these commands to add the 8.10.xx repository:

    sudo wget http://crunchbang.net/packages-8.04.xx/crunchbang.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/crunchbang.list
    

    &

    sudo wget -q http://crunchbang.net/crunchbang.key -O- | apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
    

26. Philip wrote, Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

    @szamot83: Thank you for your feedback. I do not use lxpanel's built-in menu, so I have not really had much chance to test it previous to your comment. I have done so now, and I experienced the same issues. Just a thought, but by default, xfce-mcs-manager is started when Openbox loads, have you tried replacing this with lxsession-lite? It may, or may not fix the problem. Either way, if you could let me know, I would really appreciate it. Cheers.

27. szamot83 wrote, Monday, November 24th, 2008

    Just a thought, but by default, xfce-mcs-manager is started when Openbox loads, have you tried replacing this with lxsession-lite?

    I don't know if I understand you property, I haven't got lxsession to choose in GDM. I have already solve this problem, but in very amateur way: 1. I have installed lxsession-lite (in my opinion this should be installed by default) As I mentioned, after installation (lxsession-lite) pressing logout button give nothing. Menu (I mean panel menu, not RMB menu) logout button is concern with /usr/bin/lxsession-logout file. When you enter lxsession-logout in terminal, it gives:

    error: LXSession is not running

    (this is logic)

    so I have delete Lxsession-logout and made a symbolic link named Lxsession-logout from file openbox-logout. I know, that this is silly way, but this is effective. I also tried to modify ~/.config/lxpanel/default/panels file, section logout. I was trying to replace Execute=logout, to Execute=openbox-loogout, but this also wont help. Anyway if you want me to test another way, to solve this, than write here or to szamot83 gmail.com.

    When I try to solve this problem I have noticed that command "locate" don't work. When I enter "locate logout" in terminal, it give "locate: couldn't open '/var/lib/mlocate/mlocate.db': No such file or directory" I don't know is this an Ubuntu 8.10 problem (I'm using ubuntu 8.04 on my computer) or CrunchBang 8.10.01 problem (I'm using this on my 8 year old daughter's laptop).

    If you want I could translate all CrunchBang menus, conky or anything to polish language. Give me stuff to translate and I'll do it.

28. craig wrote, Saturday, November 29th, 2008

    Hi, I installed CrunchBang this morning on my EEE 701 and I've enjoyed tweaking Conky, installing Adamm's kernel and the riceeey script to get the function keys working. HOwever, I'm also suffering the external monitor problem referred to above which I did not suffer earlier this week when using a clean install of Ubuntu 8.10. Does CrunchBang has a twin monitor app? I could only find a basic display settings feature but I'm a linux newbie so it may well be buried somewhere!

29. Philip wrote, Saturday, November 29th, 2008

    @craig: I am not too sure about this, it might be a good idea to post on the Eee PC forums. I am sure someone will be able to suggest something:
    http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=52933
    http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/11/crunchbang-on-the-eee-pc/

30. lownox wrote, Saturday, November 29th, 2008

    As a nub to the linux scene, I must say that Ubuntu was the only system that I could easily get wireless working on my notebook. Crashbang only make it all better. I have wireless working and a great look too.

    Now maybe I can actually learn more about Linux in general. :)

31. Philip wrote, Sunday, November 30th, 2008

    @lownox: Thank you for your kind words :) If you have not done so already, please visit the forums where you will find a growing community of both novice and experienced users who are sharing some great tips 'n' tricks! See: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/

32. maximegb wrote, Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

    Why do you remove tablaunch ? It was a quick and funny way to launch applications.

33. Philip wrote, Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

    @maximegb: It was removed in favour of using dmenu. Whereas tablaunch could only offer a limited number of commands, dmenu uses the system $PATH variable and can access most programs on the system. If you are attached to tablaunch, it can always be reinstalled :)